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t
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r
4Sp ifttfifi Bepplier.
BOOKS AND MEN. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25.
POINTS OF VIEW. i6mo, gilt top, #1.25.
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. i6mo, gilt top,
$1.25.
IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND OTHER PA-
PERS. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25.
A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected
by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library
for Young People. i6mo, 75 cents ; Holiday
Edition, i6mo, fancy binding, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
Boston and New York.
IN THE DOZY HOURS
VJTXL.
AND OTHER PAPERS
AGNES REPPLIER
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
1894
Copyright, 1894,
By AGNES REPPLIER.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. U. 8. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
TO
ANNIS LEE WISTER
CONTENTS..
PAcn
In the Dozy Houbs 1
J A Kitten 16
At the Novelist's Table 82
^In Behalf of Parents 42
Aut Caesar, aut Nihil 60
/ A Note on Mirrors 76
Gifts 85
Humor: English and American ... 94
The Discomforts of Luxury : A Speculation . 112
Lectures 123
Reviewers and Reviewed 137
v/Pastels : A Query 153
'Guests 158
Sympathy 165
Opinions 176
The Children's Age t 190
A Forgotten Poet 201
Dialogues 211
A Curious Contention 217
The Passing of the Essay 226
IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND
OTHER PAPERS.
IN THE DOZY HOUES.
"Montaigne and Howell's letters," says
Thackeray, " are my bedside books. If I wake
at night, I have one or other of them to prat-
tle me to sleep again. They talk about them-
selves forever, and don't weary me. I like to
hear them tell their old stories over and over
again. I read them in the dozy hours, and
only half remember them"
In the frank veracity of this last confession
there lies a pleasant truth which it is whole-
some to hear from such excellent and undis-
puted authority. Many people have told us
about the advantage of remembering what we
read, and have imparted severe counsels as to
ways and means. Thackeray and Charles
Lamb alone have ventured to hint at the equal
delight of forgetting, and of returning to some
well-loved volume with recollections softened
.id
,nd
US -flBE DOZY HPTL
s of
dry
i, the
OTHEE PA-QF
now"!
IN THE D(r~ =ST
i uipres-
jie oblit-
"MOSTAKKE am . % _-z
We may
TWkcray, " m
ilo re-read
at night. 1 bw- »• - u i w
. repeatedly
tie ate to iIbim. jati
can never
•dres foHweum^tsT^r
anticipation,
''il interest, the
.nsations of de-
i cquaintauee with
l of the sunshine
.-s of youth.
>e, — and it is well
>se tranquil mission
rs. These faithful
de" friends whom
he returned night
ours, and in whose
i found respite from
These are the vol-
2 IN THE DOZY HOURS,
into an agreeable haze. Lamb, indeed, with
characteristic impatience, sighed for the waters
of Lethe that he might have more than his
due ; that he might grasp a double portion of
those serene pleasures of which his was no
niggardly share. " I feel as if I had read all
the books I want to read," he wrote disconso-
lately to Bernard Barton. "Oh! to forget
Fielding, Steele, etc., and read 'em new! "
This is a wistful fancy in which many of us
have had our share. There come moments of
doubt and discontent when even a fresh novel
fills us with shivery apprehensions. We pick
it up reluctantly, and look at it askance, as
though it were a dose of wholesome medicine.
We linger sadly for a moment on the brink ;
and then, warm in our hearts, comes the mem-
ory of happier hours when we first read " Guy
Mannering," or "The Scarlet Letter," or "Per-
suasion ; " when we first forgot the world in
"David Copperfield," or raced at headlong
speed, with tingling veins and bated breath,
through the marvelous "Woman in White."
Alas ! why were we so ravenous in our youth ?
Like the Prodigal Son, we consumed all our
fortune in a few short years, and now the
IN THE DOZY HOURS. 3
husks, though very excellent husks indeed, and
highly recommended for their nourishing and
stimulating qualities by the critic doctors of
the day, seem to our jaded tastes a trifle dry
and savorless. If only we could forget the
old, beloved books, and "read 'em new"!
With many this is not possible, for the impres-
sion which they make is too vivid to be oblit-
erated, or even softened, by time. We may
re-refwl them, if we choose. We do re-read
them often, for the sake of lingering repeatedly
over each familiar page, but we can never
"read 'em new." The thrill of anticipation,
the joyous pursuit, the sustained interest, the
final satisfaction, — all these sensations of de-
light belong to our earliest acquaintance with
literature. They are part of the sunshine
which gilds the halcyon days of youth.
But other books there be, — and it is well
for us that this is so, — whose tranquil mission
is to soothe our grayer years. These faithful
comrades are the "bedside" friends whom
Thackeray loved, to whom he returned night
after night in the dozy hours, and in whose
generous companionship he found respite from
the fretful cares of day. These are the vol-
4 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
umes which should stand on a sacred shelf
apart, and over them a bust of Hermes, god of
good dreams and quiet slumbers, whom the
wise ancients honored soberly, as having the
best of all guerdons in his keeping. As for
the company on that shelf, there is room and
to spare for poets, and novelists, and letter-
writers ; room for those " large, still books "
so dear to Tennyson's soul, and for essays, and
gossipy memoirs, and gentle, old-time manuals
of devotion, and ghost lore, untainted by mod-
ern research, and for the "lying, readable
histories," which grow every year rarer and
more beloved. There is no room for self-con-
scious realism picking its little steps along ; nor
for socialistic dramas, hot with sin ; nor ethical
problems, disguised as stories ; nor " heroes of
complex, psychological interest," whatever they
may mean ; nor inarticulate verse ; nor angry,
anarchical reformers; nor dismal records of
vice and disease parading in the covers of a
novel. These things are all admirable in their
way, but they are not the books which the
calm Hermes takes under his benign protec-
tion. Dull, even, they may be, and provoca-
tive of slumber ; but the road to fair dreams
IN THE DOZY HOURS. 5
lies now, as in the days of the heroes, through
the shining portals of ivory.
Montaigne and James Howell, then, were
Thackeray's bedside favorites, — "the Peri-
gourdin gentleman, and the priggish little
clerk of King Charles's Council;" and with
these two " dear old friends " he whiled away
many a midnight hour. The charm of both
lay, perhaps, not merely in their diverting gos-
sip, nor in their wide acquaintance with men
and life, but in their serene and enviable un-
contentiousness. Both knew how to follow the
sagacious counsel of Marcus Aurelius, and
save themselves a world of trouble by having
no opinions on a great variety of subjects.
" I seldom consult others," writes Montaigne
placidly, " and am seldom attended to ; and I
know no concern, either public or private,
which has been mended or bettered by my ad-
vice." Ah ! what a man was there ! What a
friend to have and to hold ! "What a courtier,
and what a country gentleman ! It is pleasant
to think that this embodiment of genial toler-
ance was a contemporary of John Calvin's;
that this fine scholar, to whom a few books
were as good as many, lived unfretted by the
6 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
angry turbulence of men all bent on pulling
the world in their own narrow paths. What
wonder that Thackeray forgave him many sins
for the sake of his leisurely charm and wise
philosophy ! In fact, James Howell, the " prig-
gish little clerk," was not withheld by his prig-
gishness from relating a host of things which
are hardly fit to hear. Those were not reti-
cent days, and men wrote freely about matters
which it is perhaps as healthy and as agreeable
to let alone. But Howell was nevertheless a
sincere Churchman as well as a sincere Roy-
alist. He was sound throughout; and if he
lacked the genius and the philosophy of Mon-
taigne, he was his equal in worldly knowledge
and in tolerant good temper. He heard, en-
joyed, and repeated all the gossip of foreign
courts, all the "severe jests" which passed
from lip to lip. He loved the beauty of Italy,
the wit of France, the spirit of the Netherlands,
and the valor of Spain. The first handsome
woman that earth ever saw, he tells us, was
made of Venice glass, as beautiful and as brit-
tle as are her descendants to-day. Moreover,
" Eve spake Italian, when Adam was seduced ; "
for in that beguiling tongue, in those soft, per-
IN THE DOZY HOURS, 7
suasive accents, she felt herself to be most ir-
resistible.
There is really, as Thackeray well knew, a
great deal of pleasing information to be gath-
ered from the "Familiar Letters," and no
pedagogic pride, no spirit of carping criticism,
mars their delightful flavor. The more won-
derful the tale, the more serene the composure
with which it is narrated. Howell sees in
Holland a church monument " where an earl
and a lady are engraven, with three hundred
and sixty-five children about them, which were
all delivered at one birth." Nay, more, he
sees " the two basins in which they were chris-
tened, and the bishop's name who did it, not
yet two hundred years ago ; " so what reason-
able room is left for doubt? He tells us the
well-authenticated story of the bird with a
white breast which visited every member of
the Oxenham family immediately before death ;
and also the "choice history" of Captain
Coucy, who, dying in Hungary, sent his heart
back to France, as a gift to his own true love.
She, however, had been forced by her father
into a reluctant and unhappy marriage; and
her husband, intercepting the token, had it
8 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
cooked into a " well-relished dish," which he
persuaded his wife to eat. When she had
obeyed, he told her, in cruel sport, the ghastly
nature of the food ; but she, " in a sudden ex-
altation of joy, and with a far-fetch'd sigh,
cried, ' This is a precious cordial indeed,' and
so lick'd the dish, saying, 4 It is so precious that
't is pity to put ever any meat upon it.' So
she went to her chamber, and in the morning
she was found stone dead." Did ever rueful
tale have such triumphant ending?
Of other letter-writers, Charles Lamb and
Madame de Sevigne are perhaps best suited
for our dozy hours, because they are sure to
put us into a good and amiable frame of mind,
fit for fair slumber and the ivory gates. More-
over, the bulk of Madame de S^vigne's cor-
respondence is so great that, unless we have
been very faithful and constant readers, we are
likely to open into something which is new to
us ; and as for Lamb, those who love him at
all love him so well that it matters little which
of his letters they read, or how often they have
read them before. Only it is best to select
those written in the meridian of his life. The
earlier ones are too painful, the later ones too
JN THE DOZY HOURS. 9
sad. Let us take him at his happiest, and be
happy with him for an hour ; for, unless we go
cheerfully to bed, the portals of horn open for
us with sullen murmur, and fretful dreams,
more disquieting than even the troubled
thoughts of day, flit batlike round our melan-
choly pillows.
Miss Austen is likewise the best of mid-
night friends. There stand her novels, few in
number and shabby with much handling, and
the god Hermes smiles upon them kindly.
We have known them well for years. There
is no fresh nook to be explored, no forgotten
page to be revisited. But we will take one
down, and re-read for the fiftieth time the his-
tory of the theatricals at Mansfield Park ; and
see Mr. Yates ranting by himself in the dining-
room, and the indefatigable lovers rehearsing
amorously on the stage, and poor Mr. Rush-
worth stumbling through his two-and-forty
speeches, and Fanny Price, in the chilly little
schoolroom, listening disconsolately as her
cousin Edmund and Mary Crawford go through
their parts with more spirit and animation than
the occasion seems to demand. When Sir
Thomas returns, most inopportunely, from
10 2JV THE DOZY HOURS.
Antigua, we lay down the book with a sigh of
gentle satisfaction, knowing that we shall find
all these people in the morning just where
they belong, and not, after the fashion of
some modern novels, spirited overnight to the
antipodes, with a breakneck gap of months or
years to be spanned by our drooping imagina-
tions. Sir Walter Scott tells us, with tacit
approbation, of an old lady who always had
Sir Charles Grandison read to her when she
felt drowsy; because, should she fall asleep
and waken up again, she would lose nothing
of the story, but would find the characters
just where she had left them, « conversing in
the cedar-parlour." It would be possible to
take a refreshing nap — did our sympathy al-
low us such an alleviation — while Clarissa
Harlowe is writing, on some tiny scraps of
hidden paper, letters which fill a dozen printed
pages.
Lovers of George Borrow are wont to claim
that he is one of the choicest of bedside com-
rades. Mr. Birrell, indeed, stoutly maintains
that slumber, healthy and calm, follows the
reading of his books just as it follows a brisk
walk or rattling drive. " A single chapter of
IN THE DOZY HOURS. 11
Borrow is air and exercise." Neither need
we be very wide awake when we skim over his
pages. He can be read with half-closed eyes,
and we feel his stir and animation pleasantly
from without, just as we feel the motion of a
carriage when we are heavy with sleep. Pea-
cock is too clever, and his cleverness has too
much meaning and emphasis for this lazy de-
light. Yet, nevertheless, "The Misfortunes
of Elphin " is an engaging book to re-read —
if one knows it well already — in moments of
drowsy satisfaction. Then will the convivial
humor of " Seithenyn ap Seithyn " awake a
sympathetic echo in our hearts, shorn for the
nonce of all moral responsibility. Then will
the roar of the ocean surging through the
rotten dikes make the warm chimney corner
doubly grateful. Then is the reader pleased
to follow the fortunes of the uncrowned prince
among a people who, having " no pamphleteer-
ing societies to demonstrate that reading and
writing are better than meat and drink," lived
without political science, and lost themselves
contentedly " in the grossness of beef and ale."
Peacock, moreover, in spite of his keenness and
virility, is easily forgotten. We can "read
12 IN THE DOZY HOURS,
him new," and double our enjoyment. His
characters seldom have any substantiality.
We remember the talk, but not the talkers,
and so go blithely back to those scenes of glad
good-fellowship, to that admirable conservatism
and that caustic wit.
Let us, then, instead of striving so strenu-
ously to remember all we read, be grateful
that we can occasionally forget. Mr. Samuel
Pepys, who knew how to extract a fair share
of pleasure out of life, frankly admits that he
delighted in seeing an old play over again, be-
cause he was wise enough to commit none of it
to memory; and Mr. Lang, who gives his vote
to " Pepys's Diary " as the very prince of bed-
side books, the one " which may send a man
happily to sleep with a smile on his lips," de-
clares it owes its fitness for this post to the
ease with which it can be forgotten. "Your
deeds and misdeeds," he writes, "your dinners
and kisses, glide from our recollections, and
being read again, surprise and amuse us afresh.
Compared with you, Montaigne is dry, Bos-
well is too full of matter; but one can take
you up anywhere, and anywhere lay you down,
certain of being diverted by the picture of that
IN THE DOZY HOURS. 13
companion with whom you made your journey
through life. . . . You are perpetually the
most amusing of gossips, and, of all who have
gossiped about themselves, the only one who
tells the truth."
And the poets allied with Hermes and
happy slumber, — who are they ? Mr. Brown-
ing is surely not one of the kindly group. I
would as lief read Mr. George Meredith's
prose as Mr. Browning's verse in that hour of
effortless enjoyment. But Wordsworth holds
some placid moments in his keeping, and we
may wander on simple errands by his side,
taking good care never to listen to philosophy,
but only looking at all he shows us, until our
hearts are surfeited with pleasure, and the
golden daffodils dance drowsily before our
closing eyes. Keats belongs to dreamier
moods, when, as we read, the music of his
words, the keen creative magic of his style,
lure us away from earth. We leave the dark-
ness of night, and the grayness of morning.
We cease thinking, and are content to feel.
It is an elfin storm we hear beating against
the casement ; it is the foam of fairy seas that
washes on the shore.
14 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
" Blissfully havened both from joy and pain,"
wrapped in soft, slumberous satisfaction, we
are but vaguely conscious of the enchanted air
we breathe, or of our own unutterable well-
being. There is no English poem, save only
" Christabel," which can lead us like " The
Eve of St. Agnes " straight to the ivory gates,
and waft us gently from waking dreams to the
mistier visions of sleep. But there are many
English poets — Herrick, and Marvell, and
Gray, and Cowper, and Tennyson — who have
bedside verses for us all. Herrick, indeed,
though breathing the freshness of morning, is
a delightful companion for night. He calls
us so distinctly and seductively to leave, as he
did, the grievous cares of life; to close our
ears to the penetrating voice of duty ; to turn
away our eyes from the black scaffold of King
Charles ; and to watch, with him, the blossoms
shaken in the April wind, and the whitethorn
of May time blooming on the hills, and the
sheen of Julia's robe, as she goes by with
laughter. This is not a voice to sway us at
broad noon, when we are striving painfully to
do our little share of work; but Hesperus
should bring some respite even to the dutiful,
IN THE DOZY HOURS. 15
and in our dozy hours it is sweet to lay aside
all labor, and keenness, and altruism. Adonis,
says the old myth, fled from the amorous arms
of Aphrodite to the cold Queen of Shadows
who could promise him nothing but repose.
Worn with passion, wearied of delight, he lay
at the feet of Persephone, and bartered away
youth, strength, and love for the waters of
oblivion and the coveted blessing of sleep.
A KITTEN.
If
" The child is father of the man,"
why is not the kitten father of the cat? If
in the little boy there lurks the infant likeness
of all that manhood will complete, why does
not the kitten betray some of the attributes
common to the adult puss? A puppy is but
a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common
sense. We never hear our friends say they
love puppies, but cannot bear dogs. A kitten
is a thing apart ; and many people who lack
the discriminating enthusiasm for cats, who
regard these beautiful beasts with aversion
and mistrust, are won over easily, and cajoled
out of their prejudices by the deceitful wiles
of kittenhood.
" The little actor eons another part,"
and is the most irresistible comedian in the
world. Its wide-open eyes gleam with wonder
and mirth. It darts madly at nothing at all,
and then, as though suddenly checked in the
pursuit, prances sideways on its hind legs
A KITTEN. 17
with ridiculous agility and zeal. It makes
a vast pretense of climbing the rounds of a
chair, and swings by the curtain like an acro-
bat. It scrambles up a table leg, and is seized
with comic horror at finding itself full two
feet from the floor. If you hasten to its res-
cue, it clutches you nervously, its little heart
thumping against its furry sides, while its soft
paws expand and contract with agitation and
relief ;
" And all their harmless claws disclose,
Like prickles of an early rose."
Yet the instant it is back on the carpet it
feigns to be suspicious of your interference,
peers at you out of " the tail o' its ee," and
scampers for protection under the sofa, from
which asylum it presently emerges with cau-
tious trailing steps, as though encompassed by
fearful dangers and alarms. Its baby inno-
cence is yet unseared. The evil knowledge of
uncanny things which is the dark inheritance
of cathood has not yet shadowed its round
infant eyes. Where did witches find the
mysterious beasts that sat motionless by their
fires, and watched unblinkingly the waxen
manikins dwindling in the flame? They
18 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
never reared these companions of their soli-
tude, for no witch could have endured to see
a kitten gamboling on her hearthstone. A
witch's kitten ! That one preposterous thought
proves how wide, how unfathomed, is the gap
between feline infancy and age.
So it happens that the kitten is loved and
cherished and caressed as long as it preserves
the beguiling mirthfulness of youth. Riche-
lieu, we know, was wont to keep a family of
kittens in his cabinet, that their grace and
gayety might divert him from the cares of
state, and from black moods of melancholy.
Yet, with short-sighted selfishness, he ban-
ished these little friends when but a few
months old, and gave their places to younger
pets. The first faint dawn of reason, the
first indication of soberness and worldly wis-
dom, the first charming and coquettish pre-
tenses to maturity, were followed by immedi-
ate dismissal. Richelieu desired to be amused.
He had no conception of the finer joy which
springs from mutual companionship and es-
teem. Even humbler and more sincere ad-
mirers, like Joanna Baillie, in whom we wish
to believe Puss found a friend and champion,
A KITTEN. 19
appear to take it for granted that the kitten
should be the spoiled darling of the house-
hold, and the cat a social outcast, degraded
into usefulness, and expected to work for her
living. What else can be understood from
such lines as these ?
" Ah ! many a lightly sportive child,
Who hath, like thee, our wits beguiled,
To dull and sober manhood grown,
With strange recoil our hearts disown.
Even so, poor Kit ! must thou endure,
When thou hecomest a cat demure,
Full many a cuff and angry word,
Chid roughly from the tempting board.
And yet, for that thou hast, I ween,
So oft our favored playmate been,
Soft be the change which thou shalt prove,
When time hath spoiled thee of our love ;
Still be thou deemed, by housewife fat,
A comely, careful, mousing cat,
Whose dish is, for the public good,
Replenished oft with savory food."
Here is a plain exposition of the utilitarian
theory which Shakespeare is supposed to have
countenanced because Shylock speaks of the
"harmless, necessary cat." Shylock, for-
sooth ! As if he, of all men in Christendom
or Jewry, knew anything about cats ! Small
wonder that he was outwitted by Portia and
20 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Jessica, when an adroit little animal could so
easily beguile him. But Joanna Baillie should
never have been guilty of those snug common-
places concerning the
" comely, careful, mousing cat,"
remembering her own valiant Tabby who won
Scott's respectful admiration by worrying and
killing a dog. It ill became the possessor of
an Amazonian cat, distinguished by Sir Wal-
ter's regard, to speak with such patronizing
kindness of the race.
We can make no more stupid blunder than
to look upon our pets from the standpoint of
utility. Puss, as a rule, is another Nimrod,
eager for the chase, and unwearyingly patient
in pursuit of her prey. But she hunts for her
own pleasure, not for our convenience; and
when a life of luxury has relaxed her zeal, she
often declines to hunt at all. I knew inti-
mately two Maryland cats, well born and of
great personal attractions. The sleek, black
Tom was named Onyx, and his snow-white
companion Lilian. Both were idle, urbane,
fastidious, and self-indulgent as Lucullus.
Now, into the house honored, but not served,
A KITTEN. 21
by these charming creatures came a rat, which
secured permanent lodgings in the kitchen,
and speedily evicted the maid servants. A
reign of terror followed, and after a few days
of hopeless anarchy it occurred to the cook
that the cats might be brought from their com-
fortable cushions upstairs and shut in at night
with their hereditary foe. This was done,
and the next morning, on opening the kitchen
door, a tableau rivaling the peaceful scenes of
Eden was presented to the view. On one side
of the hearth lay Onyx, on the other, Lilian ;
and ten feet away, upright upon the kitchen
table, sat the rat, contemplating them both
with tranquil humor and content. It was
apparent to him, as well as to the rest of the
household, that he was an object of absolute,
contemptuous indifference to those two lordly
cats.
There is none of this superb unconcern in
the joyous eagerness of infancy. A kitten
will dart in pursuit of everything that is
small enough to be chased with safety. Not
a fly on the window-pane, not a moth in the
air, not a tiny crawling insect on the carpet,
escapes its unwelcome attentions. It begins
22 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
to " take notice " as soon as its eyes are open,
and its vivacity, outstripping its dawning in-
telligence, leads it into infantile perils and
wrong doing. I own that when Agrippina
brought her first-born son — aged two days —
and established him in my bedroom closet, the
plan struck me at the start as inconvenient.
I had prepared another nursery for the little
Claudius Nero, and I endeavored for a while
to convince his mother that my arrangements
were best. But Agrippina was inflexible.
The closet suited her in every respect; and,
with charming and irresistible flattery, she
gave me to understand, in the mute language
I knew so well, that she wished her baby boy
to be under my immediate protection. "I
bring him to you because I trust you," she
said as plainly as looks can speak. " Down-
stairs they handle him all the time, and it is
not good for kittens to be handled. Here he
is safe from harm, and here he shall remain."
After a few weak remonstrances, the futility
of which I too clearly understood, her persist-
ence carried the day. I removed my clothing
from the closet, spread a shawl upon the floor,
had the door taken from its hinges, and re-
A KITTEN. 23
signed myself, for the first time in my life, to
the daily and hourly companionship of an in-
fant.
I was amply rewarded. People who require
the household cat to rear her offspring in some
remote attic, or dark corner of the cellar, have
no idea of all the diversion and pleasure that
they lose. It is delightful to watch the little
blind, sprawling, feeble, helpless things develop
swiftly into the grace and agility of kitten-
hood. It is delightful to see the mingled
pride and anxiety of the mother, whose paren-
tal love increases with every hour of care, and
who exhibits her young family as if they were
infant Gracchi, the hope of all their race.
During Nero's extreme youth, there were
times, I admit, when Agrippina wearied both
of his companionship and of her own maternal
duties. Once or twice she abandoned him at
night for the greater luxury of my bed, where
she slept tranquilly by my side, unmindful of
the little wailing cries with which Nero la-
mented her desertion. Once or twice the heat
of early summer tempted her to spend the
evening on the porch roof which lay beneath
my windows, and I have passed some anxious
24 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
hours awaiting her return, and wondering
what would happen if she never came back,
and I were left to bring up the baby by hand.
But as the days sped on, and Nero grew
rapidly in beauty and intelligence, Agrip-
pina's affection for him knew no bounds.
She could hardly bear to leave him even for a
little while, and always came hurrying back to
him with a loud frightened mew, as if fearing
he might have been stolen in her absence. At
night she purred over him for hours, or made
little gurgling noises expressive of ineffable
content. She resented the careless curiosity
of strangers, and was a trifle supercilious
when the cook stole softly in to give vent to
her fervent admiration. But from first to last
she shared with me her pride and pleasure;
and the joy in her beautiful eyes, as she raised
them to mine, was frankly confiding and sym-
pathetic. When the infant Claudius rolled
for the first time over the ledge of the closet,
and lay sprawling on the bedroom floor, it
would have been hard to say which of us was
the more elated at his prowess. A narrow
pink ribbon of honor was at once tied around
the small adventurer's neck, and he was pro-
A KITTEN. 25
nounced the most daring and agile of kittens.
From that day his brief career was a series of
brilliant triumphs. He was a kitten of parts.
Like one of Miss Austen's heroes, he had air
and countenance. Less beautiful than his
mother, whom he closely resembled, he easily
eclipsed her in vivacity and the specious arts
of fascination. Never were mother and son
more unlike in character and disposition, and
the inevitable contrast between kittenhood and
cathood was enhanced in this case by a strong
natural dissimilarity which no length of years
could have utterly effaced.
Agrippina had always been a cat of mani-
fest reserves. She was only six weeks old
when she came to me, and had already ac-
quired that gravity of demeanor, that air of
gentle disdain, that dignified and somewhat
supercilious composure, which won the respect-
ful admiration of those whom she permitted
to enjoy her acquaintance. Even in moments
of self-forgetf ulness and mirth her recreations
resembled those of the little Spanish Infanta,
who, not being permitted to play with her in-
feriors, and having no equals, diverted herself
as best she could with sedate and solitary
26 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
sport. Always chary of her favors, Agrip-
pina cared little for the admiration of her
chosen circle ; and, with a single exception,
she made no friends beyond it.
Claudius Nero, on the contrary, thirsted for
applause. Affable, debonair, and democratic
to the core, the caresses and commendations of
a chance visitor or of a housemaid were as
valuable to him as were my own. I never
looked at him " showing off," as children say,
— jumping from chair to chair, balancing
himself on the bedpost, or scrambling raptu-
rously up the forbidden curtains, — without
thinking of the young Emperor who contended
in the amphitheatre for the worthless plaudits
of the crowd. He was impulsive and affec-
tionate, — so, I believe was the Emperor for
a time, — and as masterful as if born to the
purple. His mother struggled hard to main-
tain her rightful authority, but it was in vain.
He woke her from her sweetest naps ; he
darted at her tail, and leaped down on her
from sofas and tables with the grace of a di-
minutive panther. Every time she attempted
to punish him for these misdemeanors he cried
piteously for help, and was promptly and un«
A KITTEN, 27
wisely rescued by some kind-hearted member
of the family. After a while Agrippina took
to sitting on her tail, in order to keep it out
of his reach, and I have seen her many times
carefully tucking it out of sight. She had
never been a cat of active habits or of showy
accomplishments, and the daring agility of
the little Nero amazed and bewildered her.
" A Spaniard," observes that pleasant gossip,
James Howell, "walks as if he marched, and
seldom looks upon the ground, as if he con-
temned it. I was told of a Spaniard who,
having: got a fall by a stumble, and broke his
nose, If e up, and in a disdainful manner said,
4 This comes of walking on the earth.' "
Now Nero seldom walked on the earth. At
least, he never, if he could help it, walked on
the floor ; but traversed a room in a series of
flying leaps from chair to table, from table to
lounge, from lounge to desk, with an occa-
sional dash at the mantelpiece, just to show
what he could do. It was curious to watch
Agrippina during the performance of these
acrobatic feats. Pride, pleasure, the anxiety
of a mother, and the faint resentment of con-
scious inferiority struggled for mastership in
28 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
her little breast. Sometimes, when Nero's
radiant self-satisfaction grew almost insuffer-
able, I have seen her eyelids narrow sullenly,
and have wondered whether the Roman Em-
press ever looked in that way at her brilliant
and beautiful son, when maternal love was
withering slowly under the shadow of coming
evil. Sometimes, when Nero had been pran-
cing and paddling about with absurd and irre-
sistible glee, attracting and compelling the
attention of everybody in the room, Agrippina
would jump up on my lap, and look in my
face with an expression I thought I under-
stood. She had never before valued my affec-
tion in all her little petted, pampered life.
She had been sufficient for herself, and had
merely tolerated me as a devoted and use-
ful companion. But now that another had
usurped so many of her privileges, I fancied
there were moments when it pleased her to
know that one subject, at least, was not to be
beguiled from allegiance ; that to one friend,
at least, she always was and always would be
the dearest cat in the world.
I am glad to remember that love triumphed
over jealousy, and that Agrippina's devotion
A KITTEN. 29
to Nero increased with every day of his short
life. The altruism of a cat seldom reaches
beyond her kittens ; but she is capable of he-
roic unselfishness where they are concerned.
I knew of a London beast, a homeless, forlorn
vagrant, who constituted herself an out-door
pensioner at the house of a friendly man of
letters. This cat had a kitten, whose youth-
ful vivacity won the hearts of a neighboring
family. They adopted it willingly, but re-
fused to harbor the mother, who still came for
her daily dole to her only benefactor. When-
ever a bit of fish or some other especial dainty
was given her, this poor mendicant scaled the
wall, and watched her chance to share it with
her kitten, her little wealthy, greedy son, who
gobbled it up as remorselessly as if he were
not living on the fat of the land.
Agrippina would have been swift to follow
such an example of devotion. At dinner time
she always yielded the precedence to Nero,
and it became one of our daily tasks to com-
pel the little lad to respect his mother's privi-
leges. He scorned his saucer of milk, and
from tenderest infancy aspired to adult food,
making predatory incursions upon Agrippina's
30 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
plate, and obliging us finally to feed them in
separate apartments. I have seen him, when
a very young kitten, rear himself upon his
baby legs, and with his soft and wicked little
paw strike his mother in the face until she
dropped the piece of meat she had been eat-
ing, when he tranquilly devoured it. It was
to prevent the recurrence of such scandalous
scenes that two dining-rooms became a neces-
sity in the family. Yet he was so loving and
so lovable, poor little Claudius Nero ! Why
do I dwell on his faults, remembering, as I
do, his winning sweetness and affability?
Day after day, in the narrow city garden, the
two cats played together, happy in each other's
society, and never a yard apart. Night after
night they retired at the same time, and slept
upon the same cushion, curled up inextricably
into one soft, furry ball. Many times I have
knelt by their chair to bid them both good-
night ; and always, when I did so, Agrippina
would lift her charming head, purr drowsily
for a few seconds, and then nestle closer still
to her first-born, with sighs of supreme sat-
isfaction. The zenith of her life had been
reached. Her cup of contentment was full.
A KITTEN. 31
It is a rude world, even for little cats, and
evil chances lie in wait for the petted crea-
tures we strive to shield from harm. Remem-
bering the pangs of separation, the possibili-
ties of unkindness or neglect, the troubles
that hide in ambush on every unturned page,
I am sometimes glad that the same cruel and
selfish blow struck both mother and son, and
that they lie together, safe from hurt or haz-
- ard, sleeping tranquilly and always, under
the shadow of the friendly pines.
AT THE NOVELIST'S TABLE.
"Compare," said a friend to me recently,
" the relative proportion of kissing and veni-
son pasties in Scott's novels and Miss Rhoda
Broughton's, " — and I did. It was a lame
comparison, owing to my limited acquaintance
with part of the given text ; but I pursued my
investigations cheerfully along the line of
Waverley, and was delighted and edified by
the result. Years ago, a sulky critic in
Blackwood, commenting acrimoniously on Miss
Susan Warner's very popular tales, asserted
that there was more kissing in one of these
narratives than in all the stories Sir Walter
ever wrote. Probably the critic was right.
As far as I can recollect Miss Warner's hero-
ines, — and I knew several of them intimately
when a child, — they were always either kiss-
ing or crying, and occasionally they did both
together. Ellen Montgomery, dissolved in
tears because John has forgotten to kiss her
good-night, was as cheerless a companion as I
AT THE NOVELIST'S TABLE. 33
ever found in the wide world of story-book
life.
But Scott's young people never seem to
hunger for embraces. They allow the most
splendid opportunities to slip by without a
single caress. When Quentin Durward res-
cues the Countess Isabella at the siege of Liege,
he does not pause to passionately kiss her cold
lips ; he gathers her up with all possible speed,
and makes practical plans for getting her oui
of the way. When Edith Bellenden visits her
imprisoned lover, no thought of* kissing enters
either mind. Henry Morton is indeed so over-
come by " deep and tumultuous feeling " that
he presses his visitor's " unresisting hands ; "
but even this indulgence is of brief duration.
Miss Bellenden quickly recovers her hands,
and begins to discuss the situation with a
great deal of sense and good feeling. Henry
Bertram does not appear to have stolen a sin-
gle kiss from that romantic and charming
young woman, Julia Mannering, in the whole
course of their clandestine courtship ; and the
propriety of Lord Glenvarloch's behavior, when
shut up in a cell with pretty Margaret Ram-
say, must be remembered by all. " Naething
34 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
for you to sniggle and laugh at, Steenie," ob-
serves King James reprovingly to the Duke of
Buckingham, when that not immaculate noble-
man betrays some faint amusement at the
young Scotchman's modesty. u He might be
a Father of the Church, in comparison of you,
man."
In the matter of venison pasties, however,
we have a different tale to tell. There are
probably ten of these toothsome dishes to every
kiss, twenty of them to every burst of tears.
Compare Quentin Durward as a fighter to
Quentin Durward as a lover, and then, by way
of understanding how he preserved his muscle,
turn back to that delightful fourth chapter,
where the French King plays the part of host
at the famous inn breakfast. So admirably is
the scene described in two short pages, so fine
is the power of Scott's genial human sympathy,
that I have never been able, since reading it,
to cherish for Louis XI. the aversion which is
his rightful due. In vain I recall the familiar
tales of his cruelty and baseness. In vain I
remind mjrself of his treacherous plans for poor
Durward's destruction. 'T is useless ! I can-
not dissociate him from that noble meal, nor
AT THE NOVELIST 1 8 TABLE. 35
from the generous enthusiasm with which he
provides for, and encourages, the splendid
appetite of youth. The inn breakfast has but
one peer, even in Scott's mirthful pages, and
to find it we must follow the fortunes of an-
other monarch who masquerades to better pur-
pose than does Maitre Pierre, whose asylum is
the hermitage of St. Dunstan, and whose host
is the jolly Clerk of Copmanhurst. The grad-
ual progress and slow development of the holy
hermit's supper, which begins tentatively with
parched pease and a can of water from St.
Dunstan's well, and ends with a mighty pasty
of stolen venison and a huge flagon of wine,
fill the reader's heart — if he has a heart —
with sound and sympathetic enjoyment. It is
one of the gastronomic delights of literature.
Every step of the way is taken with renewed
pleasure, for the humors of the situation are
as unflagging as the appetites and the thirst of
the revelers. Even the quarrel which threat-
ens to disturb the harmony of the feast only
adds to its flavor. Guest and host, disguised
king and pretended recluse, are as ready to
fight as to eat ; and, with two such champions,
who shall say where the palm of victory hides ?
36 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Any weapon will suit the monk, "from the
scissors of Delilah, and the tenpenny nail of
Jael, to the scimitar of Goliath," though the
good broadsword pleases him best. Any
weapon will suit King Richard, and he is a
match for Friar Tuck in all. Born brothers
are they, though the throne of England waits
for one, and the oaks of Sherwood Forest for
the other.
" But there is neither east, nor west, border, nor breed, nor
birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they
come from the ends of the earth."
In his descriptions of eating and drinking,
Scott stands midway between the snug, coarse,
hearty enjoyment of Dickens, and the frank
epicureanism of Thackeray, and he easily sur-
passes them both. With Dickens, the pleasure
of the meal springs from the honest appetites
which meet it — appetites sharpened often by
the pinching pains of hunger. With Thack-
eray, it is the excellence of the entertainment
itself which merits approbation. With Scott,
it is the spirit of genial good-fellowship which
turns a venison pasty into a bond of brother-
hood, and strengthens, with a runlet of canary,
AT THE NOVELIST'S TABLE. 37
the human tie which binds us man to man.
Dickens tries to do this, but does not often
succeed, just because he tries. A conscious
purpose is an irresistible temptation to oratory,
and we do not want to be preached to over a
roast goose, nor lectured at through the medium
of pork and greens. Scott never turns a table
into a pulpit ; it is his own far-reaching sym-
pathy which touches the secret springs that
move us to kind thoughts. Quentin Durward's
breakfast at the inn is worthy of Thackeray.
Quentin Durward's appetite is worthy of Dick-
ens. But Quentin Durward's host — the cruel
and perfidious Louis — ah ! no one but Scott
would have dared to paint him with such fine,
unhostile art, and no one but Scott would have
succeeded.
In point of detail, however, Dickens defies
competition. Before his vast and accurate
knowledge the puny efforts of modern realism
shrink into triviality and nothingness. What
is the occasional dinner at a third-class New
York restaurant, the roast chicken and mashed
potatoes and cranberry tart, eaten with such
ostentatious veracity, when compared to that
unerring observation which penetrated into
38 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
every English larder, which lifted the lid of
every pipkin, and divined the contents of every
mysterious and forbidding meat pie ! Dickens
knew when the Micawbers supped on lamb's
fry, and when on breaded chops ; he knew the
contents of Mrs. Bardell's little saucepan sim-
mering by the fire ; he knew just how many
pigeons lurked under the crust of John Brow-
die's pasty; he knew every ingredient — and
there are nearly a dozen of them — in the Jolly
Sandboys' stew. There was not a muffin, nor
a bit of toasted cheese, nor a slab of pease-pud-
ding from the cook-shop, nor a rasher of ba-
con, nor a slice of cucumber, nor a dish of pet-
titoes eaten without his knowledge and consent.
And, as it cost him no apparent effort to re-
member and tell all these things, it costs us no
labor to read them. We are naturally pleased
to hear that Mr. Vincent Crummies has or-
dered a hot beefsteak-pudding and potatoes at
nine, and we hardly need to be reminded —
even by the author — of the excellence of Mr.
Swiveller's purl. The advantage of uncon-
scious realism over the premeditated article is
a lack of stress on the author's part, and a
corresponding lack of fatigue on ours.
AT THE NOVELIST' 8 TABLE. 39
Thackeray reaches the climax of really good
cooking, and, with the art of a great novelist,
he restrains his gastronomic details, and keeps
them, within proper bounds. Beyond his
limits it is not wise to stray, lest we arrive
at the land of gilded puppets, where Disraeli's
dukes and duchesses feast forever on ortolans,
and pompetones of larks, and lobster sand-
wiches; where young spendthrifts breakfast
at five o'clock in the afternoon on soup and
claret ; and where the enamored Lothair feeds
Miss Arundel " with cates as delicate as her
lips, and dainty beverages which would not
outrage their purity." The " pies and prepara-
tions of many lands " which adorn the table
of that distinguished dinner-giver, Mr. Brance-
peth, fill us with vague but lamentable doubts.
44 Royalty," we are assured, 44 had consecrated
his banquets " and tasted of those pies ; but it
is the province of royalty, as Mr. Buskin re-
minds us, to dare brave deeds which common-
ers may be excused from attempting. Hugo
Bohun, at the Duke's banquet, fired with the
splendid courage of his crusading ancestry,
dislodges the ortolans from their stronghold '
of aspic jelly, and gives to the entertainment
40 IN THE DOZY HOURS,
that air of glittering unreality which was Dis-
raeli's finest prerogative, and which has been
copied with facile fidelity by Mr. Oscar
Wilde. " I see it is time for supper," ob-
serves the aesthetic Gilbert of the dialogues.
"After we have discussed some Chambertin
and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the
question of the critic, considered in the light
of the interpreter." And when we read these
lines, our lingering doubts as to whether Gil-
bert be a man or a mere mouthpiece for beau-
tiful words, " a reed cut short and notched by
the great god Pan for the production of flute-
melodies at intervals," fade into dejected cer-
tainty. That touch about the ortolans is so
like Disraeli, that all Gilbert's surpassing
modern cleverness can no longer convince us
of his vitality. He needs but a golden plate
to fit him for the ducal dining-table, where
royalty, and rose-colored tapestry, and " splen-
did nonchalance" complete the dazzling illu-
sion. After which, we may sober ourselves
with a parting glance at the breakfast-room of
Tillietudlem, and at the fare which Lady
Margaret Bellenden has prepared for Graham
of Claverhouse and his troopers. "No tea,
AT THE NOVELIST'S TABLE. 41
no coffee, no variety of rolls, but solid and
substantial viands — the priestly ham, the
knightly surloin, the noble baron of beef, the
princely venison pasty." Here in truth is a
vigorous and an honorable company, and here
is a banquet for men.
IN BEHALF OF PARENTIS.
It is a thankless task to be a parent in
these exacting days, and I wonder now and
then at the temerity which prompts man or
woman to assume such hazardous duties.
Time was, indeed, when parents lifted their
heads loftily in the world; when they were
held to be, in the main, useful and responsible
persons; when their authority, if unheeded,
was at least unquestioned ; and when one of
the ten commandments was considered to indi-
cate that especial reverence was their due.
These simple and primitive convictions lin-
gered on so long that some of us can perhaps
remember when they were a part of our youth-
ful creed, and when, in life and in literature,
the lesson commonly taught was that the
province of the parent is to direct and control,
the privilege of the child is to obey, and to be
exempt from the painful sense of responsi-
bility which overtakes him in later years. In
very old-fashioned books, this point of view is
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 43
strained to embrace some rather difficult con-
clusions. The attitude of Evelina to her
worthless father, of Clarissa Harlowe to her
tyrannical parents, seemed right and reason-
able to the generations which first read these
novels, while we of the present day are amazed
at such unnatural submissiveness and loyalty.
" It is hard," says Clarissa's mother, in an-
swer to her daughter's despairing appeals, " if
a father and mother, and uncles and aunts, all
conjoined, cannot be allowed to direct your
choice ; " an argument to which the unhappy
victim replies only with her tears. How one
longs to offer Mrs. Harlowe some of these lit-
tle manuals of advice which prove to us now
so conclusively that even a young child is
deeply wronged by subjection. " Looked at
from the highest standpoint," says one of our
modern mentors, u we have no more right to
interfere with individual choice in our children
than we have to interfere with the choice of
friends ; " a statement which, applied as it
is, not to marriageable young women, but to
small boys and girls, defines matters explicitly,
and does away at once and forever with all
superannuated theories of obedience.
44 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
A short perusal of these text-books of train-
ing would lead the uninitiated to conclude
that the children of to-day are a down-trodden
race, deprived of their natural rights by the
ruthless despotism of parents. It is also indi-
cated with painful and humiliating distinct-
ness thafc adults have no rights — at least none
that children are bound to respect — and that
we have hardened ourselves into selfishness by
looking at things from a grown-up, and conse-
quently erroneous, point of view. For exam-
ple, to many of us it is an annoyance when a
child wantonly destroys our property. This
is ungenerous. " With anointed eyes we
might often see in such a tendency a great
power of analysis, that needs only to be un-
derstood to secure grand results;" — which
reflection should make us prompt to welcome
the somewhat disastrous results already se-
cured. I once knew a little boy who, having
been taken on a visit to some relatives, suc-
ceeded within half an hour in purloining the
pendulums of three old family clocks, a pas-
sion for analysis which ought to have made
him one of the first mechanics of his age, had
not his genius, like that of the political agita-
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 45
tor, stopped short at the portals of reconstruc-
tion.
It is hard to attune our minds to a correct
appreciation of such incidents, when the clocks
belong to us, and the child doesn't. It is
hard to be told that our pendulums are a
necessary element, which we do wrong to be-
grudge, in the training of a boy's observation.
All modern writers upon children unite in
denouncing the word "don't," as implying
upon every occasion a censure which is often
unmerited. But this protest reminds me of
the little girl who, being told by her father
she must not say " I won't," innocently in-
quired : " But, papa, what am I to say when
I mean 4 1 won't ' ? " In the same spirit of
uncertainty I would like to know what I am
to say when I mean " don't." Auretta Roys
Aldrich, who has written a book on " Children
— Their Models and Critics," in which she is
rather severe upon adults, tells us a harrowing
tale of a mother and a five-year-old boy who
sat near her one day on a railway train. The
child thrust his head out of the window,
whereupon the mother said tersely : " Johnnie,
stop putting your head out of the window ! "
46 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
That was all. No word of explanation op
entreaty softened this ruthless command.
Whether Johnnie obeyed or not is unrevealed,
being a matter of no importance ; but, " as
they left the car," comments the author, " they
left also an aching in my heart. I longed to
clasp the mother in my arms, for she, too, had
been the victim of misunderstanding; and
show her, before it was too late, how she was
missing the pure gold of life for herself and
her little boy." Happily, before long, another
mother entered, and her child also put his
head as far as he could out of that trouble-
some window, which nobody seemed to have
the sense to shut. Observing this, his wise
parent sat down by his side, " made some
pleasant remark about the outlook," and then
gradually and persuasively revealed to him
his danger, discussing the matter with " much
candor and interest," until he was finally won
over to her point of view, and consented of
his own free will, and as a rational human be-
ing, to draw in his little head.
I think this double experience worth repeat-
ing, because it contrasts so pleasantly with
the venerable anecdote which found its way
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 47
into all the reading books when I was a small
child, and illustrated the then popular theory
of education. It was the story of a mother
who sees her boy running rapidly down a
steep hill, and knows that, almost at his feet,
lies an abandoned quarry, half hidden by un-
derbrush and weeds. Sure of his obedience,
she calls sharply, "Stop, Willie!" and the
child, with a *L effort, stays his steps at
the very mouth of the pit. Had it been neces-
sary to convince him first that her appre-
hensions were well grounded, he would have
broken his neck meanwhile, and our school-
books would have had one tale less to tell.
Still more astounding to the uninitiated is
another little narrative, told with enviable
gravity by Mrs. Aldrich, and designed to
show how easily and deeply we wound a
child's inborn sense of justice. " A beautiful
boy of four whose parents were unusually wise
in dealing with him" — it is seldom that a
parent wins this degree of approbation — pos-
sessed a wheelbarrow of his own, in which he
carried the letters daily to and from the post-
office. One morning he was tardy in return-
ing, " for there was the world to be explored "
48 IN THE DOZY H0UR8.
on the way ; and his mother, growing anxious,
or perhaps desiring her mail, followed him to
know what was the matter. She met him at
the post-office door, and seeing in the barrow
an envelope directed to herself, she rashly
picked it up and opened it. Edwin promptly
"raised a vehement cry of protest." That
letter, like all the rest, had been given to him
to carry, and no one else was privileged to
touch it. Swiftly and repentantly his mother
returned the unfortunate missive, but in vain.
" The wound was too deep, and he continued
to cry 4 Mamma, you ought not to have done
it ! ' over and over again between his sobs."
In fact he " refused to be comforted," — com-
forted ! — " and so was taken home as best he
could be, and laid tenderly and lovingly in
bed. After sleeping away the sharpness of
sorrow and disappointment, and consequent
exhaustion, the matter could be talked over ;
but while he was so tired, and keenly smart-
ing under the sense of injustice done Urn,
every word added fuel to the flame. . . . His
possessions had been taken away from him
by sheer force, before which he was helpless.
That his indignation was not appeased by put-
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 49
ting the letter back into his keeping, showed
that he was. contending for a principle, and
not for possession or any selfish interest."
Readers of George Eliot may be pleasantly
reminded of that scene in the "Mill on the
Floss " where Tom Tulliver unthinkingly with-
draws a rattle with which he has been amus-
ing baby Moss, " whereupon she, being a baby
that knew her own mind with remarkable
clearness, instantaneously expressed her sen-
timents in a piercing yell, and was not to be
appeased even by the restoration of the rattle,
f eeling apparently that the original wrong of
having it taken away from her remained in all
its force." But to some of us the anecdote of
Edwin and his wheelbarrow is more disheart-
ening than droll.- The revelation of such ad-
mirable motives underlying such inexcusable
behavior puzzles and alarms us. If this four-
year-old prig " contending for a principle and
not for possession " be a real boy, what has
become of all the dear, naughty, fighting,
obstinate, self-willed, precious children whom
we used to know ; the children who contended
joyously, not for principle, but for precedence,
and to whom we could say " don't " a dozen
50 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
times a day with ample justification. Little
boys ought to be the most delightful things in
the world, with the exception of little girls.
It is as easy to love them when they are bad
as to tolerate them when they are good. But
what can we do with conscientious infants to
whom misbehavior is a moral obligation, and
who scream in the public streets from an ex-
alted sense of justice ?
Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, that ardent
champion of Froebel, has also given to the
world a book bearing the somewhat ominous
title, " Children's Rights," but which is for the
most part as interesting as it is sane. Setting
aside the question of kindergartens, concerning
which there are at present many conflicting
opinions, it is impossible not to agree with
Mrs. Wiggin in much that she states so deftly,
and maintains so vivaciously. There is little
doubt that the rights of the parent do infringe
occasionally on the rights of the child, and
that, in the absence of any standard, the child
becomes a creature of circumstance. He can
be fed unwholesomely, kept up late at night,
dressed like Lord Fauntleroy, dosed with per-
nicious drugs, and humored into selfish petu.
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 51
lance at the discretion of his mother. Worse
still, he can be suffered to waste away in fever
pain and die, because his parents chance to
be fanatics who reject the aid of medicines to
trust exclusively in prayer. But granting all
this, fathers and mothers have still their places
in the world, and until we can fill these places
with something better, it is worth while to call
attention now and then to the useful part they
play. It is perhaps a significant fact that
mothers, simply because they are mothers,
succeed better, as a rule, in bringing up their
children than other women, equally loving and
sensible, who are compelled to assume their
duties. That old-fashioned plea "I know
what is best for my child " may be derided as
a relic of darkness ; but there is an illuminat-
ing background to its gloom. I am not even
sure that parents stand in absolute need of all
the good advice they receive. I am quite sure
that many trifles are not worth the serious
counsels expended upon them. Reading or
telling a story, for instance, has become as
grave a matter as choosing a laureate, and
many a mother must stand aghast at the con-
flicting admonitions bestowed upon her : Bead
52 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
fairy tales. Don't read fairy tales. Bead
about elves. Don't read about ogres. Read
of heroic deeds. Don't read of bloody battles.
Avoid too much instruction. Be as subtly in-
structive as you can. Make your stories long.
Make your stories short. Work the moral in.
Leave the moral out. Try and please the
older children. Try and charm the younger
ones. Study the tastes of boys. Follow the
fancies of girls. By degrees the harassed
parent who endeavors to obey these instruc-
tions will cease telling stories at all, confident
that the task, which once seemed so simple
and easy, must lie far beyond her limited in-
telligence.
All that Mrs. Wiggin has to say about chil-
dren's books and playthings is both opportune
and true. I wish indeed she would not speak
of restoring toys " to their place in education,"
which has a dismal sound, though she does not
mean it to be taken dismally. Toys are toys
to her, not traps to erudition, and the costly
inanities of our modern nurseries fill her with
well-warranted aversion. We are doing our
best to stunt the imaginations of children by
overloading them with illustrated story-books
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 53
and elaborate playthings. Little John Bus-
kin, whose sole earthly possessions were a cart,
a ball, and two boxes of wooden bricks, was
infinitely better off than the small boy of to-
day whose real engine drags a train of real cars
over a miniature elevated railway, almost as
ghastly as reality, and whose well-dressed sol-
diers cannot fight until they are wound up with
a key. " The law was that I should find my
own amusement," says Ruskin ; and he found
it readily enough in the untrammeled use of
his observation, his intelligence, and his fancy.
I have known children to whom a dozen spools
had a dozen distinct individualities ; soldiers,
priests, nuns, and prisoners of war ; and to
whom every chair in the nursery was a well-
tried steed, familiar alike with the race-course
and the Holy Land, having its own name, and
requiring to be carefully stabled at night after
the heroic exertions of the day. The roman-
ces and dramas of infancy need no more set-
ting than a Chinese play, and in that limitless
dreamland the transformations are as easy as
they are brilliant. But no child can success-
fully " make believe," when he is encumbered
on every side by mechanical toys so odiously
54 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
complete that they leave nothing for the imagi-
nation to supply.
In the matter of books, Mrs. Wiggin dis-
plays the same admirable conservatism, her
modern instincts being checked and held in
sway by the recollection of those few dear old
volumes which little girls used to read over
and over again, until they knew them by heart.
Yet I hardly think that " naughty " is a kind
word to apply to Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond,
who is not very wise, I admit, and under no
circumstances a prig, but always docile and
charming and good. And why should the
44 red morocco housewife," which Rosamond, in
one of her rare moments of discretion, chooses
instead of a stone plum, be stigmatized aa
44 hideous but useful." It may have been an
exceedingly neat and pretty possession. We
are told nothing to the contrary, and I had a
brown one stamped with gold when I was a
little girl, which, to my infant eyes represented
supreme artistic excellence. It also hurts my
feelings very much to hear Casabianca dubbed
an " inspired idiot," who lacked the sense to
escape. Unless the Roman sentries found
dead at their posts in Pompeii were also in-
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 55
spired idiots, there should be some kinder
word for the blind heroism which subordinates
reason to obedience. And I am by no means
sure that this form of relentless nineteenth-
century criticism does not do more to vulgarize
a chad's mind by destroying his simple ideals,
than do the frank old games which Mrs. Wig-
gin considers so boorish, and which fill her
with " unspeakable shrinking and moral dis-
gust." The coarseness of "Here come two
ducks ar-roving," which was once the blithest
of pastorals, and of that curious relic of anti-
quity, " Green Gravel," is not of a hurtful
kind, and some of these plays have a keen
attraction for highly imaginative children.
For my part, I do not believe that all the kin-
dergarten games in Christendom, all the gentle
joy of pretending you were a swallow and had
your little baby swallows cuddled under your
wing, can compare for an instant with the lost
delight of playing " London Bridge " in the
dusk of a summer evening, or in the dimly-lit
schoolroom at bedtime. There was a mysteri-
ous fascination in the words whose meaning
no one understood, and no one sought to un-,
derstand: —
66 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
" Here comes a candle to light you to bed
And here comes a hatchet to cut off your head."
And then the sudden grasp of four strong
little arms, and a pleasing thrill of terror at a
danger which was no danger, — only a shadow
and a remembrance of some dim horror in the
past, living for generations in the unbroken
traditions of play.
I have wandered unduly from the wrongs
of parents to the rights of children, an easy
and agreeable step to take. But the children
have many powerful advocates, and need no
help from me. The parents stand undefended,
and suffer grievous things in the way of coun-
sel and reproach. It must surprise some of
them occasionally to be warned so often against
undue severity. It must amaze them to hear
that their lazy little boys and girls are suffer-
ing from overwork, and in danger of mental
exhaustion. It must amuse them — if they
have any sense of humor — to be told in the
columns of a weekly paper " How to Reprove
a Child," just as they are told " How to Make
an Apple Pudding," and " How to Remove
Grease Spots from Clothing." As for the
discipline of the nursery, that has become a
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 57
matter of supreme importance to all whom it
does not concern, and the suggestions offered,
the methods urged, are so varied and conflict-
ing that the modern mother can be sure of one
thing only, — all that she does is wrong. The
most popular theory appears to be that when-
ever a child is naughty it is his parent's fault,
and she owes him prompt atonement for his
misbehavior. "We should be astonished, if
not appalled," says Mrs. Aldrich, " if we could
see in figures the number of times the average
child is unnecessarily censured during the first
seven years of life." Punishment is altogether
out of favor. Its apparent necessity arises
from the ill-judged course of the father or
mother in refusing to a child control over his
own actions. This doctrine was expounded to
us some years ago by Helen Hunt, who rea-
soned wisely that " needless denials " were re-
sponsible for most youthful naughtiness, and
who was probably right. It would not perhaps
be too much to say that if we could have what
we wanted and do what we wanted all through
life, we should, even as adults, be saved from
a great deal of fretfulness and bad behavior.
Miss Nora Smith, who is Mrs. Wiggin's
58 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
clever collaborateur, allows, however, what she
terms " natural punishment," or " natural re-
tribution," which appears to be something like
the far-famed justice of the Mikado, and is
represented as being absolutely satisfactory to
the child. This is a gain over the old methods
which the child, as a rule, disliked ; and it is
also a gain over the long-drawn tests so ur-
gently commended by Helen Hunt, whose
model mother shut herself up for two whole
days with her four-year-old boy, until she suc-
ceeded, by moral suasion, in inducing him to
say G. During these two days the model
mother's equally model husband was content
to eat his meals alone, and to spend his even-
ings in solitude, unless he went to his club, and
all her social and domestic duties were cheer-
fully abandoned. Her principle was, not to
enforce obedience, but to persuade the child to
overcome his own reluctance, to conquer his
own will. With this view, she pretended for
forty-eight hours that he could not pronounce
the letter, and that she was there to help him
to do it. The boy, baby though he was, knew
better. He knew he was simply obstinate, and,
with the delicious clear-sightedness of children,
which ought to put all sentimental theorists
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS. 59
to shame, he actually proposed to his parent
that she should shut him in a closet and see if
that would not "make him good ! " Of course
the unhallowed suggestion was not adopted ;
but what a tale it tells of childish acumen, and
of that humorous grasp of a situation which is
the endowment of infancy. The dear little
sensible, open-eyed creatures ! See them deal-
ing out swift justice to their erring dolls, and
you will learn their views upon the subject of
retribution. I once knew a father who de-
fended himself for frequently thrashing an
only and idolized son — who amply merited
each chastisement — by saying that Jack would
think him an idiot if he did n't. That father
was lamentably ignorant of much that it be-
hooves a father now to acquire. He had
probably never read a single book designed
for the instruction and humiliation of parents.
He was in a state of barbaric darkness con-
cerning the latest theories of education. But
he knew one thing perfectly, and that one
thing, says Sir Francis Doyle, is slipping fast
from the minds of men ; namely, " The inten-
tion of the Almighty that there should exist
for a certain time between childhood and man-
hood, the natural production known as a boy."
AUT OESAR AUT NIHIL.
Theee is a sentence in one of Miss Mit-
ford's earliest and most charming papers,
"The Cowslip Ball," which has always de-
lighted me by its quiet satire and admirable
good-temper. She is describing her repeated
efforts and her repeated failures to tie the
fragrant clusters together. •
"We went on very prosperously, considering,
as people say of a young lady's drawing, or a
Frenchman's English, or a woman's tragedy,
or of the poor little dwarf who works without
fingers, or the ingenious sailor who writes with
his toes, or generally of any performance
which is accomplished by means seemingly in-
adequate to its production."
Here is precisely the sentiment which Dr.
Johnson embodied, more trenchantly, in his
famous criticism of female preaching. " Sir,
a woman's preaching is like a dog walking on
its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are
surprised to find it done at all." It is a senti-
AUT CjESAR aut nihil. 61
ment which, in one form or another, prevailed
throughout the last century, and lapped over
into the middle of our own. Miss Mitford is
merely echoing, with cheerful humor, the
opinions of the very clever and distinguished
men whom it was her good fortune to know,
and who were all the more generous to her
and to her sister toilers, because it did not
occur to them for a moment that women
claimed, or were ever going to claim, a serious
place by their sides. There is nothing clearer,
in reading the courteous and often flattering
estimate of woman's work which the critics of
fifty years ago delighted in giving to the
world, than the under-current of amusement
that such things should be going on. Chris-
topher North, who has only censure and con-
tempt for the really great poets of his day, is
pleased to lavish kind words on Mrs. Hemans
and Joanna Baillie, praising them as adults
occasionally praise clever and good children.
That neither he nor his boon companions of
the " Noctes " are disposed to take the matter
seriously, is sufficiently proved by North's gal-
lant but controvertible statement that all
female poets are handsome. " No truly ugly
62 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
woman ever yet wrote a truly beautiful poem
the length of her little finger." The same
satiric enjoyment of the situation is apparent
in Thackeray's description of Barnes New-
come's lecture on " Mrs. Hemans, and the Poe-
try of the Affections," as delivered before the
appreciative audience of the Newcome Athe-
naeum. The distinction which the lecturer
draws between man's poetry and woman's poe-
try, the high-flown civility with which he
treats the latter, the platitudes about the Chris-
tian singer appealing to the affections, and
.decorating the homely threshold, and wreath-
ing flowers around the domestic hearth ; — all
these graceful and generous nothings are the
tributes laid without stint at the feet of that
fragile creature known to our great-grand-
fathers as the female muse.
It may as well be admitted at once that this
tone of combined diversion and patronage has
changed. Men, having come in the course of
years to understand that women desire to work,
and need to work, honestly and well, have
made room for them with simple sincerity, and
stand ready to compete with them for the cov-
eted prizes of life. This is all that can in fair-
AUT CjESAR AUT NIHIL. 63
ness be demanded ; and, if we are not equipped
for the struggle, we must expect to be beaten,
until we are taught, as Napoleon taught the
Allies, how to fight. We gain nothing by do-
ing for ourselves what man has ceased to do
for us, — setting up little standards of our own,
and rapturously applauding one another when
the easy goal is reached. We gain nothing by
withdrawing ourselves from the keenest com-
petition, because we know we shall be outdone.
We gain nothing by posing as " women
workers," instead of simply " workers ; " or by
separating our productions, good or bad, from
the productions, good or bad, of men. As for
exacting any special consideration on the score
of sex, that is not merely an admission of
failure in the present, but of hopelessness for
the future. If we are ever to accomplish any-
thing admirable, it must be by a frank admis-
sion of severe tests. There is no royal road
for woman's feet to follow.
As we stand now, our greatest temptation
to mediocrity lies in our misleading content ;
and this content is fostered by our incorrigible
habit of considering ourselves a little aside
from the grand march of human events. Why
64 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
should a new magazine be entitled " Woman's
Progress," as if the progress of woman were
one thing, and the progress of man another ?
If we are two friendly sexes working hand in
hand, how is it possible for either to progress
alone ? Why should I be asked to take part in a
very animated discussion on " What constitutes
the success of woman?" Woman succeeds
just as man succeeds, through force of charac-
ter. She has no minor tests, or, if she has,
they are worthless. Above all, why should we
have repeated the pitiful mistake of putting
woman's work apart at the World's Fair, as
though its interest lay in its makers rather
than in itself. Philadelphia did this seven-
teen years ago, but in seventeen years women
should have better learned their own worth.
Miss Mitford's sentence, with its italicized
" considering," might have been written around
the main gallery of the Woman's Building,
instead of that curious jumble of female names
with its extraordinary suggestion of perspec-
tive, — Mme. de Stael and Mrs. Potter Palmer,
Pocahontas and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. The
erection of such a building was a tacit ac-
knowledgment of inferior standards, and
AUT CjESAR aut nihil. 65
therein lies our danger. All that was good
and valuable beneath its roof should have been
placed elsewhere, standing side by side with
the similar work of men. All that was un-
worthy of such competition should have been
excluded, as beneath our dignity, as well
as beneath the dignity of the Exposi-
tion. Patchwork quilts in fifteen thousand
pieces, paper flowers, nicely stitched aprons,
and badly painted little memorandum-books
do not properly represent the attitude of the
ability of women. We are not begging for
consideration and applause ; we are striving
to do our share of the world's work, and to do
it as well as men.
Shall we ever succeed? It is not worth
while to ask ourselves a question which none
can answer. Reasoning by analogy, we never
shall. Hoping in the splendid possibilities of
an unknown future, we may. But idle conten-
tion over what has been done already is not
precisely the best method of advance. To
wrangle for months over the simple and ob-
vious statement that there have been no great
women poets, is a lamentable waste of energy,
and leads to no lasting good. To examine
66 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
with fervent self -consciousness the exact result
of every little step we take, the precise atti-
tude of the world toward us, while we take it,
is a retarding and unwholesome process.
Why should an indefatigable philanthropist,
like Miss Frances Power Cobbe, have paused
in her noble labor to write such a fretful sen-
tence as this ?
" It is a difficult thing to keep in mind the
true dignity of womanhood, in face of the
deep, underlying contempt wherewith all but
the most generous of men regard us."
Perhaps they do, though the revelation is a
startling one, and the last thing we had ever
suspected. Nevertheless, the sincere and sin-
gle-minded worker is not asking herself anxious
questions anent man's contempt, but is pre-
serving " the true dignity of womanhood " by
going steadfastly on her appointed road, and
doing her daily work as well as in her lies.
Neither does she consider the conversion of
man to a less scornful frame of mind as the
just reward of her labors. She has other and
broader interests at stake. For my own part,
I have a liking for those few writers who are
admirably explicit in their contempt for wo-
AUT CuESAR AUT NIHIL. 67
men, and I find them more interesting and
more stimulating than the u generous" men
who stand forth as the champions of our
sex, and are insufferably patronizing in their
championship. When Schopenhauer says
distinctly that women are merely grown-up
babies, short-sighted, frivolous, and occupying
an intermediate stage between children and
men ; when he protests vigorously against the
absurd social laws which permit them to share
the rank and titles of their husbands, and in-
sists that all they require is to be well fed
and clothed, I feel a sincere respect for this
honest statement of unpopular and somewhat
antiquated views. Lord Byron, it will be re-
membered, professed the same opinions, but
his ingenuousness is by no means so apparent.
Edward Fitzgerald's distaste for women writers
is almost winning in its gentle candor. Rus-
kin, despite his passionate chivalry, reiterates j
with tireless persistence his belief that woman
is man's helpmate, and no more. Theoreti-
cally, he is persuasive and convincing. Prac-
tically, he is untouched by the obtrusive fact
that many thousands of women are never called
on to be the helpmates of any men, fathers,
68 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
brothers, or husbands, but must stand or fall
alone. Upon their learning to stand depends
much of the material comfort, as well as the
finer morality, of the future.
And surely, the first and most needful les-
son for them to acquire is to take themselves
and their work with simplicity, to be a little
less self-conscious, and a little more sincere.
In all walks of life, in all kinds of labor, this
is the beginning of excellence, and proficiency
follows in its wake. We talk so much about
thoroughness of training, and so little about
singleness of purpose. We give to every girl in
our public schools the arithmetical knowledge
which enables her to stand behind a counter
and cast up her accounts. That there is some-
thing else which we do not give her is suf-
ficiently proven by her immediate adoption of
that dismal word, " saleslady," with its pitiful
assumption of what is not, its pitiful disregard
of dignity and worth. I own I am dispirited
when I watch the more ambitious girls who
attend our great schools of manual training
and industrial art. They are being taught on
generous and noble lines. The elements of
beauty and appropriateness enter into their
AUT CjESAR aut nihil. 69
hourly work. And yet — their tawdry finery,
the nodding flower-gardens on their hats, the
gilt ornaments in their hair, the soiled kid
gloves too tight for their broad young hands,
the crude colors they combine so pitilessly in
their attire, their sweeping and bedraggled
skirts, their shrill, unmodulated voices, their
giggles and ill-controlled restlessness — are
these the outward and visible results of a
training avowedly refining and artistic ? Are
these the pupils whose future work is to raise
the standard of beauty and harmonious devel-
opment ? Something is surely lacking which
no technical skill can supply. Now, as in the
past, character is the base upon which all true
advancement rests secure.
Higher in the social and intellectual scale,
and infinitely more serious in their ambitions,
are the girl students of our various colleges.
As their numbers increase, and their superior
training becomes less and less a matter of
theory, and more and more a matter of course,
these students will combine at least a portion
of their present earnestness with the healthy
commonplace rationality of college men. At
present they are laboring under the disadvan-
70 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
tage of being the exceptions instead of the
rule. The novelty of their position dazes
them a little ; and, like the realistic story-tell-
ers and the impressionist painters, they
are perhaps more occupied with their points
of view than with the things they are
viewing. This is not incompatible with a
very winning simplicity of demeanor, and the
common jest which represents the college girl
as prickly with the asperities of knowledge, is
a fabric of man's jocund and inexhaustible im-
agination. Mr. Barrie, it is true, tells a very
amusing story of being invited, as a mere lad,
to meet some young women students at an
Edinburgh party, and of being frightened out
of his scanty self-possession when one of them
asked him severely whether he did not con-
aider that Berkeley's immaterialism was
founded on an ontological misconception.
But even Mr. Barrie has a fertile fancy, and
perhaps the experience was not quite so bad
as it sounds. There is more reason in the
complaint I have heard many times from mo-
thers, that college gives their daughters a
distaste for social life, and a rather ungracious
disregard for its amenities and obligations.
AUT CjESAR aut nihil. 71
But college does not give men a distaste for
social life. On the contrary, it is the best
possible training for that bigger, broader field
in which the ceaseless contact with their fel-
low-creatures rounds and perfects the many-
sidedness of manhood. If college girls are
disposed to overestimate the importance of
lectures, and to underestimate the importance
of balls, this is merely a transient phase of
criticism, and has no lasting significance. Lec-
tures and balls are both very old. They have
played their parts in the history of the world
for some thousands of years ; they will go on
playing them to the end. Let us not exagger-
ate personal preference, however contagious it
may appear, into a symbol of approaching re-
volution.
For our great hope is this: As university
training becomes less and less exceptional for
girls, they will insensibly acquire broader and
simpler views; they will easily understand
that life is too big a thing to be judged by
college codes. As the number of women doc-
tors and women architects increases with every
year, they will take themselves, and be taken
by the world, with more simplicity and candor.
72 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
They will also do much better work when we
have ceased writing papers, and making
speeches, to signify our wonder and delight
that they should be able to work at all ; when
we have ceased patting and praising them as
so many infant prodigies. Perhaps the time
may even come when women, mixing freely in
political life, will abandon that injured and
aggressive air which distinguishes the present
advocate of female suffrage. Perhaps, oh,
joyous thought ! the hour may arrive when
women having learned a few elementary facts
of physiology, will not deem it an.imperative
duty to embody them at once in an unwhole-
some novel. These unrestrained disclosures
which are thrust upon us with such curious
zest, are the ominous fruits of a crude and
hasty mental development ; but there are some
sins which even ignorance can only partially
excuse. Things seen in the light of ampler
knowledge have a different aspect, and bear
a different significance; but the "fine and
delicate moderation " which Mme. de Souza
declared to be woman's natural gift, should
preserve her, even when semi-instructed, from
all gross offences against good taste. More-
AUT CjESAR aut nihil. 73
over " whatever emancipates our minds with-
out giving us the mastery of ourselves is de-
structive," and if the intellectual freedom of
woman is to be a noble freedom it must not
degenerate into the privilege of thinking what-
ever she likes, and saying whatever she pleases.
That instinctive refinement which she has ac-
quired in centuries of self-repression is not a
quality to be undervalued, or lightly thrust
aside. If she loses " the strength that lies in
delicacy," she is weaker in her social emanci-
pation than in her social bondage.
The word " Virago," in the Renaissance,
meant a woman of culture, character, and
charm ; a " man-like maiden " who combined
the finer qualities of both sexes. The gradual
debasement of a word into a term of reproach
is sometimes a species of scandal. It is wil-
fully perverted in the course of years, and
made to tell a different tale, — a false tale,
probably, — which generations receive as true.
On the other hand, it sometimes marks the
swift degeneracy of a lofty ideal. In either
case, the shame and pity are the same. Hap-
pily, as we are past the day when men looked
askance upon women's sincere efforts at ad-
74 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
vancement, so we are past the day when wo-
men deemed it profitable to ape distinctly
masculine traits. We have outgrown the first
rude period of abortive and misdirected
energy, but it does not follow that the millen-
nium has been reached. Mr. Arnold has ven-
tured to say that the best spiritual fruit of
culture is to keep man from a self-satisfaction
which is retarding and vulgarizing, yet no one
recognized more clearly than he the ungra-
cious nature of the task. What people really
like to be told is that they are doing all things
well, and have nothing to learn from anybody.
This is the reiterated message from the gods
of which the daily press delivers itself so sapi-
ently, and by which it maintains its popularity
a*d power. This is the tone of all the nic*
little papers about woman's progress, and wo-
man's work, and woman's influence, and wo-
man's recent successes in literature, science,
and art. " I gain nothing by being with such
as myself," sighed Charles Lamb, with noble
discontent. " We encourage one another in
mediocrity" This is what we women are do-
ing with such apparent satisfaction; we are
encouraging one another in mediocrity. We
AUT CAESAR AUT NIHIL. 75
are putting up easy standards of our own, in
place of the best standards of men. We are
sating our vanity.with small and ignoble tri-
umphs, instead of struggling on, defeated,
routed, but unconquered still, with hopes high
set upon the dazzling mountain-tops which we
may never reach.
A NOTE ON MIRRORS.
Heinrich Heine, who had a particularly-
nice and discriminating taste in ghosts, and
who studied with such delicate pleasure the
darkly woven fancies of German superstition,
frankly admitted that to see his own face by
moonlight in a mirror thrilled him with inde-
finable horror. Most of us who are blessed,
or burdened, with imaginations have shared at
moments in this curious fear of that smooth,
shining sheet of glass, which seems to hold
within itself some power mysterious and ma-
lign. By daytime it is commonplace enough,
and lends itself with facile ease to the cheerful
and homely nature of its surroundings. But
at dusk, at night, by lamplight, or under the
white, insinuating moonbeams, the mirror as-
sumes a distinctive and uncanny character
of its own. Then it is that it reflects that
which we shrink from seeing. Then it is that
our own eyes meet us with an unnatural stare
and a piercing intelligence, as if another soul
A NOTE ON MIRRORS. 77
were watching us from their depths with fur-
tive, startled inquiry. Then it is that the in-
visible something in the room, from which the
merciful dullness of mortality has hitherto
saved us, may at any instant take sudden
shape, and be seen, not in its own form, but
reflected in the treacherous glass, which, like
the treacherous water, has the power of be-
traying things that the air, man's friendly
element, refuses to reveal.
This wise mistrust of the ghostly mirror is so
old and so far spread that we meet with it in
the folk lore of every land. An English tra-
dition warns us that the new moon, which
brings us such good fortune when we look at
it in the calm evening sky, carries a message
of evil to those who see it first reflected in a
looking-glass. For such unlucky mortals the
lunar virus distils slow poison and corroding
care. The child who is suffered to see his
own image in a mirror before he is a year old
is marked out for trouble and many disappoint-
ments. The friends who glance at their reflec-
tions standing side by side are doomed to
quick dissension. The Swedish girl who looks
into her glass by candlelight risks the loss of
78 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
her lover. A universal superstition, which
has found its way even to our own prosaic
time and country, forbids a bride to see her-
self in a mirror after her toilet is completed.
If she be discreet, she turns away from that
fair picture which pleases her so well, and
then draws on her glove, or has some tiny rib-
bon, flower, or jewel fastened to her gown, that
the sour Fates may be appeased, and evil
averted from her threshold. In Warwickshire
and other parts of rural England it was long
the custom to cover all the looking-glasses in a
house of death, lest some affrighted mortal
should behold in one the pale and shrouded
corpse standing by his side. There is a
ghastly story of a servant maid who, on leav-
ing the chamber where her dead master lay,
glanced in the uncovered mirror, and saw the
sheeted figure on the bed beckoning her rig-
idly to its side.
Some such tale as this must have been told
me in my infancy, for in no other way can I
account for the secret terror I felt for the
little oval mirror which hung by my bed at
school. Every night I turned it carefully
with its face to the wall, lest by some evil
A NOTE ON MIRRORS. 79
chance I should arise and look in it. Every
night I was tormented with the same haunting
notion that I had not remembered to turn it ;
and then, shivering with cold and fright, I
would creep out of bed, and, with averted
head and tightly shut eyes, feel my way to the
wretched thing, and assure myself of what I
knew already, that its harmless back alone
confronted me. I never asked myself what
it was I feared to see ; — some face that was
not mine, some apparition born of the dark-
ness and of my own childish terror. Nor can
I truly say that this apprehension, inconven-
ient though it seemed on chilly winter nights,
did not carry with it a vague, sweet pleasure
of its own. Little girls of eleven may be no
better nor wiser for the scraps of terrifying
folk lore which formed part of my earliest
education, yet in one respect, at least, I tri-
umphed by their aid. Even the somewhat
spiritless monotony of a convent school was
not without its vivifying moments for a child
who carried to bed with her each night a
horde of goblin fears to keep her imagination
lively.
Superstitions of a less ghostly character
80 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
cluster around the mirror, and are familiar to
us all. To break one is everywhere an evil
omen. " Seven years' trouble, but no want,"
follow fast upon such a mishap in Yorkshire,
while in Scotland, the cracking of a looking-
glass, like the falling of the doomed man's
picture from the wall, is a presage of ap-
proaching death. Such portents as these,
however, — though no one who is truly wise
presumes to treat them with levity, — are
powerless to thrill us with that indefinable
and subtle horror which springs from cause-
less emotions. Scott, in his prologue to " Aunt
Margaret's Mirror," has well defined the pecu-
liar fear which is without reason and without
cure. The old lady who makes her servant
maid draw a curtain over the glass before she
enters her bedroom, " so that she " (the maid)
" may have the first shock of the apparition,
if there be any to be seen," is of far too prac-
tical a turn to trouble herself about the ra-
tionality of her sensations. " Like many
other honest folk," she does not like to look
at her own reflection by candlelight, because
it is an eerie thing to do. Yet the tale she
tells of the Paduan doctor and his magic mir-
A NOTE ON MIRRORS. 81
ror is, on the other hand, neither interesting
nor alarming. It has all the dreary qualities
of a psychical research report which cannot
even provoke us to a disbelief.
In fact, divining-crystals, when known as
such professionally, are tame, hard-working,
almost respectable institutions. In the good
old days of necromancy, magicians had no
need of such mechanical appliances. Any re-
flecting surface would serve their turn, and a
bowl of clear water was enough to reveal to
them all that they wanted to know. It was of
more importance, says Brand, " to make choice
of a young maid to discern therein those im-
ages or visions which a person defiled cannot
see." Even the famous mirror, through whose
agency Dr. Dee and his seer, Kelly, were said
to have discovered the Gunpowder Plot, was
in reality nothing more than a black polished
stone, closely resembling coal.
" Kelly did all his feats upon
The devil's looking-glass, a stone."
Yet in an old Prayer-Book of 1737 there is a
woodcut representing the king and Sir Ken-
elm Digby gazing into a circular mirror, in
which are reflected the Houses of Parliament,
82 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
and a man entering them with a dark lantern
in his hand. Above, the eye of Providence is
seen darting a ray of light upon the mirror.
Below are legs and hoofs, as of evil spirits fly-
ing rapidly away. The truth is, so many con-
flicting details are related of Dr. Dee's useful
and benevolent possession that it has lost a lit-
tle of its vraisemblance. We are wont to
rank it confusedly with such mystic treasures
as the mirror which told the fortunate Alas-
nam whether or not a maid were as chaste as
she was beautiful, or the glass which Reynard
described with such minute and charming
falsehoods to the royal lioness, who would fain
have gratified her curiosity by a sight of its
indiscreet revelations.
It is never through magic mirrors, nor crys-
tal balls, nor any of the paraphernalia now so
abundantly supplied by painstaking students
of telepathy that we approach that shadowy
land over which broods perpetual fear. Let
us rather turn meekly back to the fairy-taught
minister of Aberfoyle, and learn of him the
humiliating truth that " every drop of water
is a Mirrour to returne the Species of Things,
were our visive Faculty sharpe enough to ap-
A NOTE ON MIRRORS. 83
prebend them." In other words, we stand in
need, not of elaborate appliances, bat of a
chastened spirit. If we seek the supernatural
with the keen apprehension which is begotten
of credulity and awe, we shall never find our-
selves disappointed in our quest. The same
reverend authority tells us that " in a Witch's
Eye the Beholder cannot see his own Image
reflected, as in the Eyes of other people,"
which is an interesting and, it may be, a very
useful thing to know.
Two curious stories having relation to the
ghostly character of the mirror will best serve
to illustrate my text. The first is found in
Shelley's journal; one of the inexhaustible
store supplied to the poet by " Monk " Lewis,
and is about a German lady who, dancing with
her lover at a ball, saw in a glass the reflec-
tion of her dead husband gazing at her with
stern, reproachful eyes. She is said to have
died of terror. The second tale is infinitely
more picturesque. In the church of Santa
Maria Novella at Florence is the beautiful
tomb of Beata Villana, the daughter of a no-
ble house, and married in extreme youth to
one of the family of Benintendi. Tradition
84 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
says that she was very fair, and that, being
arrayed one night for a festival, she stood
looking long in the mirror, allured by her own
loveliness. Suddenly her eyes were opened,
and she saw, close by her side, a demon
dressed with costly raiment like her own, and
decked with shining jewels like those she wore
upon her arms and bosom. Appalled by this
vision of evil, Beata Villana fled from the
vanities of the world, and sought refuge in a
convent, where she died a holy death in 1360,
being then but twenty-eight years of age.
Her marble effigy rests on its carven bed in
the old Florentine church, and smiling angels
draw back the curtains to show her sweet,
dead beauty, safe at last from the perilous
paths of temptation. In such a legend as this
there lingers for us still the elements of mys-
tery and of horror which centuries of prosaic
progress are powerless to alienate from that
dumb witness of our silent, secret hours, the
mirror.
GIFTS.
There is a delightful story, which we owe
to Charles Lever's splendid mendacity, of an
old English lady who sent to Garibaldi, dur-
ing that warrior's confinement at Varignano, a
portly pincushion well stocked with British
pins. Her enthusiastic countrywomen had
already supplied their idol with woolen under-
wear, and far-lined slippers, and intoxicating
beverages, and other articles equally useful to
an abstemious prisoner of war in a hot cli-
mate ; but pins had been overlooked until this
thoughtful votary of freedom offered her trib-
ute at its shine.
Absurd though the tale Appears, it has its
counterparts in more sober L^, and few
men of any prominence have not bewailed at
times their painful popularity. Sir Walter
Scott, who was the recipient of many gifts,
had his fair share of vexatious experiences,
and laughs at' them somewhat ruefully now
and then in the pages of his journal. Eight
88 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
appears to have derived a keen and kindly
pleasure from the more reasonable and mod-
est presents of his friends. Perhaps, like
Steele, he looked upon it as a point of
morality to be obliged to those who endeav-
ored to oblige him. Perhaps it was easy
for one so lovable to detect the honest affec-
tion which inspired these varied gifts. It
is certain we find him returning genial
thanks, now to Hazlitt for a pig, now to
Wordsworth for a " great armful " of poetry,
and now to Thomas Allsop for some Stilton
cheese, — " the delicatest, rainbow-hued, melt-
ing piece I ever flavored." He seems equally
gratified with an engraving of Pope sent by
Mr. Procter, and with another pig, — "a
dear pigmy," he calls it, — the gift of
Mrs. Bruton. Nor is it only in these let-
ters of acknowledgment — wherein courtesy
dispenses occasionally with the companion-
ship of truth — that Lamb shows himself
a generous recipient of his friends' good
will. He writes to Wordsworth, who has
sent him nothing, and expresses his frank
delight in some fruit which has been left
early that morning at his door : —
GIFTS. 89
"There is something inexpressibly pleas-
ant to me in these presents, be it fruit,
or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are
a legitimate cause of acceptance. If pre-
sents be not the soul of friendship, they
are undoubtedly the most spiritual part
of the body of that intercourse. There is
too much narrowness of thinking on this
point. The punctilio of acceptance, me-
thinks, is too confined and strait-laced. I
could be content to receive money, or
clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend.
Why should he not send me a dinner as well
as a desert? I would taste him in all the
beasts of the field, and through all creation.
Therefore did the basket of fruit of the
juvenile Talf ourd not displease me."
It is hard not to envy Talfourd when one
reads these lines. It is hard not to envy
any one who had the happiness of giving
fruit, or cheese, or pigs to Charles Lamb.
How gladly would we all have brought our
offerings to his door, and have gone away
with bounding hearts, exulting in the
thought that our pears would deck his
table, our pictures his wall, our books his
90 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
scanty shelves ! " People seldom read a
book which is given to them," observes
Dr. Johnson, with his usual discouraging
acumen; but Lamb found leisure, amid
heavy toil, to peruse the numerous volumes
which small poets as well as big ones thought
fit to send him. He accepted his gifts with
a charming munificence which suggests those
far-off, fabulous days when presents were
picturesque accessories of life ; when hosts
gave to their guests the golden cups from
which they had been drinking; and sultans
gave their visitors long trains of female
slaves, all beautiful, and carrying jars of
jewels upon their heads; and Merlin gave
to Gwythnothe famous hamper which mul-
tiplied its contents an hundredfold, and fed
the starving hosts in storm-swept Caradi-
gion. In those brave years, large-hearted
men knew how to accept as well as how to
give, and they did both with an easy grace
for which our modern methods offer no ade-
quate opportunity. Even in the veracious
chronicles of hagiology, the old harmonious
sentiment is preserved, and puts us to the
blush. St. Martin sharing his cloak with
GIFTS. 91
the beggar at the gates of Tours was hardly
what we delight in calling practical; yet
not one shivering outcast only, but all man-
kind would have been poorer had that man-
tle been withheld. King Canute taking off
his golden crown, and laying it humbly on
St. Edmund's shrine, stirs our hearts a little
even now; while Queen Victoria sending
fifty pounds to a deserving charity excites
in us no stronger sentiment than esteem.
It was easier, perhaps, for a monarch to do
a gracious and a princely deed when his
crown and sceptre were his own property
instead of belonging to the state; and pic-
turesqueness, ignore it as we may, is a
quality which, like distinction, "fixes the
world's ideals."
These noble and beautiful benefactions,
however, are not the only ones which linger
pleasantly in our memories. Gifts there
have been, of a humble ami domestic kind,
the mere recollection of which is a continual
delight. I love to think of Jane Austen's
young sailor brother, her "own particular
little brother," Charles, spending his first
prize money in gold chains and "topaze
92 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
crosses" for his sisters. What prettier,
warmer picture can be called to mind than
this handsome, gallant, light-hearted lad —
handsomer, Jane jealously insists, than
all the rest of the family — bringing back
to his quiet country home these innocent tro-
phies of victory ? Surely it was the pleasure
Miss Austen felt in that "topaze" cross,
that little golden chain, which found such
eloquent expression in Fanny Price's
mingled rapture and distress when her
sailor brother brought her the amber cross
from Sicily, and Edmund Bertram offered
her, too late, the chain on which to hang
it. It is a splendid reward that lies in
wait for boyish generosity when the sister
chances to be one of the immortals, and
hands down to generations of readers the
charming record of her gratitude and love.
By the side of this thoroughly English pic-
ture should be placed, in justice and in har-
mony, another which is as thoroughly
German, — Rahel Varnhagen sending to
her brother money to bring him to Berlin.
The letter which accompanies this sisterly
gift is one of the most touching in literature.
GIFTS. 93
The brilliant, big-hearted woman is yearning
for her kinsman's face. She has saved the
trifling sum required through many unnamed
denials. She gives it as generously as if it
cost her nothing. Yet with that wise thrift
which goes hand in hand with liberality, she
warns her brother that her husband knows
nothing of the matter. Not that she mistrusts
his nature for a moment. He is good and
kind, but he is also a man, and has the custom-
ary shortsightedness of his sex. "He will
think," she writes, "that I have endless
resources, that I am a millionaire, and will
forget to economize in the future."
Ah, painful frugality of the poor Father-
land ! Here is nothing picturesque, nor lav-
ish, nor light-hearted, to tempt our jocund
fancies. Yet here, as elsewhere, the gener-
ous soul refuses to be stinted of its joy ; and
the golden crown of King Canute is not more
charming to contemplate than are the few
coins wrested from sordid needs, and given
with a glad munificence which makes them
splendid as the ransom of a prince.
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.
Nations, like individuals, stand self-be-
trayed in their pastimes and their jests. The
ancient historians recognized this truth, and
thought it well worth their while to gossip
pleasantly into the ears of attentive and grate-
ful generations. Cleopatra playfully outwit-
ting Anthony by fastening a salted fish to the
boastful angler's hook is no less clear to us
than Cleopatra sternly outwitting Caesar with
the poison of the asp, and we honor Plutarch
for confiding both these details to the world.
Their verity has nothing to do with their
value or our satisfaction. The mediaeval
chroniclers listened rapturously to the clamor
of battle, and found all else but war too trivial
for their pens. The modern scholar produces
that pitiless array of facts known as constitu-
tional history ; and labors under the strange
delusion that acts of Parliament, or acts of
Congress, reform bills, and political pamphlets
represent his country's life. If this sordid
% HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 95
devotion to the concrete suffers no abatement,
the intelligent reader of the future will be
compelled to reconstruct the nineteenth century
from the pages of " Punch " and " Life," from
faded play-bills, the records of the race-track,
and the inextinguishable echo of dead laughter.
For man lives in his recreations, and is re-
vealed to us by the search-light of an epigram.
Humor, in one form or another, is character-
istic of every nation ; and reflecting the salient
points of social and national life, it illuminates
those crowded corners which history leaves
obscure. The laugh that we enjoy at our own
expense betrays us to the rest of the world,
and the humorists of England and America
have been long employed in pointing out with
derisive fingers their own, and not their neigh-
bor's shortcomings. If we are more reckless
in our satire, and more amused at our own
wit, it is because we are better tempered, and
newer to the game. The delight of being a
nation, and a very big nation at that, has not
yet with us lost all the charm of novelty, and
we pelt one another with ridicule after the
joyously aggressive fashion of schoolboys pelt-
ing one another with snowballs. Already
96 IN THE DOZY H0TTR8.
there is a vast array of seasoned and recog-
nized jokes which are leveled against every
city in the land. The culture of Boston, the
slowness of Philadelphia, the ostentation of
New York, the arrogance and ambition of
Chicago, the mutual jealousy of Minneapolis
and St. Paul, — these are themes of which the
American satirist never wearies, these are
characteristics which he has striven, with some
degree of success, to make clear to the rest of
mankind. Add to them our less justifiable
diversion at official corruption and misman-
agement, our glee over the blunders and ras-
calities of the men whom we permit to govern
us, and we have that curious combination of
keenness and apathy, of penetration and in-
difference which makes possible American
humor.
Now Englishmen, however prone to laugh
at their own foibles, do not, as a rule, take their
politics lightly. Those whom I have known
were most depressingly serious when discuss-
ing the situation with friends, and most dis-
agreeably violent when by chance they met
an opponent. Neither do they see anything
funny in being robbed by corporations ; but,
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 97
with discouraging and unhumorous tenacity,
exact payment of the last farthing of debt,
fulfilment of the least clause in a charter.
Our lenity in such matters is a trait which
they fail to understand, and are disinclined to
envy. One of the most amusing scenes I ever
witnessed was an altercation between an ex-
ceedingly clever Englishwoman, who for years
has taken a lively part in public measures, and
a countrywoman of my own, deeply imbued
with that gentle pessimism which insures con-
tentment, and bars reform. The subject un-
der discussion was the street-car service of
Philadelphia (which would have been primi-
tive for Asia Minor), and the Englishwoman
was expressing in no measured terms her
amazement at such comprehensive and un-
qualified inefficiency. In vain my American
friend explained to her that this car-service
was one of the most diverting things about our
Quaker city, that it represented one of those
humorous details which gave Philadelphia its
distinctly local color. The Englishwoman
declined to be amused. " I do not understand
you in the least," she said gravely. "You
have a beautiful city, of which you should be
98 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
proud. You have disgraceful streets and
trams, of which you should be ashamed. Yet
you ridicule your city as if you were ashamed
of that, and defend your trams as if you were
proud of them. If you think it funny to be
imposed on, you will never be at a loss for a
joke."
Yet corruption in office, like hypocrisy in
religion, has furnished food for mirth ever
since King Log and King Stork began their
beneficent reigns. Diogenes complained that
the people of Athens liked to have the things
they should have held most dear pelted with
dangerous banter. Kant found precisely the
same fault with the French, and even the his-
tory of sober England is enlivened by its share
of such satiric laughter. " Wood was dear at
Newmarket," said a wit, when Sir Henry Mon-
tague received there the white staff which
made him Lord High Treasurer of England,
for which exalted honor he had paid King
James the First full twenty thousand pounds.
The jest sounds so light-hearted, so free from
any troublesome resentment, that it might
have been uttered in America ; but it is well
to remember that such witticisms pointed un-
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 99
erringly to the tragic downfall of the Stuarts.
Indeed, the gayest laugh occasionally rings a
death-knell, and so our humorists wield a
power which could hardly be entrusted into
better hands. " Punch " has the cleanest record
of any English journal. It has ever — save
for those perverse and wicked slips which cost
it the friendship of stouthearted Richard
Doyle — allied itself with honor and honesty,
and that sane tolerance which is the basis of
humor. " Life " has fought an even braver
fight, and has been the active champion of all
that is helpless and ill-treated, the advocate
of all that is honorable and sincere. The
little children who crawl, wasted and fever-
stricken, through the heated city streets, the
animals that pay with prolonged pain for the
pleasures of scientific research, — these hap-
less victims of our advanced civilization find
their best friend in this New York comic paper.
The girl whose youth and innocence are bar-
tered for wealth in the open markets of matri-
mony, sees no such vigorous protest against
her degradation as in its wholesome pages. It
is scant praise to say that " Life " does more
to quicken charity, and to purify social corrup-
100 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
tion than all the religious and ethical journals
in the country. This is the natural result of
its reaching the proper audience. It has the
same beneficent effect that sermons would
have if they were preached to the non-church-
going people who require them.
When we have learned to recognize the fact
that humor does not necessarily imply fun, we
will better understand the humorist's attitude
and labors. There is nothing, as a rule, very
funny, in the weekly issues of " Punch," and
" Puck," and " Life." Many of the jokes ought
to be explained in a key like that which ac-
companied my youthful arithmetic ; and those
which need no such deciphering are often so
threadbare and feeble from hard usage, that
it is scarcely decent to exact further service
from them. It has been represented to us
more than once that the English, being conser-
vative in the matter of amusement, prefer
those jests which, like " old Grouse in the gun-
room," have grown seasoned in long years of
telling. " Slow to understand a new joke,"
says Mrs. Pennell, " they are equally slow to
part with one that has been mastered." But
there are some time-honored jests — the young
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 101
housekeeper's pie, for example, and the tramp
who is unable to digest it — which even a con-
servative American, if such an anomaly exists,
would relinquish dry-eyed and smiling. It is
not for such feeble waggery as this that we
value our comic journals, but for those vital
touches which illuminate and betray the tragic
farce called life. " Punch's " cartoon depicting
Bismarck as a discharged pilot, gloomily quit-
ting the ship of state, while overhead the
young emperor swaggers and smiles derisively,
is in itself an epitome of history, a realization
of those brief bitter moments which mark
the turning-point of a nation and stand for the
satire of success. " Life's " sombre picture of
the young wife bowing her head despairingly
over the piano, as though to shut out from her
gaze her foolish, besotted husband, is an un-
flinching delineation of the most sordid, pitiful
and commonplace of all daily tragedies. In
both these masterly sketches there is a grim
humor, softened by kindliness, and this is the
key-note of their power. They are as unlike
as possible in subject and in treatment, but the
undercurrent of human sympathy is the same.
Is it worth while, then, to be so contentious
102 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
over the superficial contrasts of English and
American humor, when both spring from the
same seed, and nourish the same fruit ? Why-
should we resent one another's methods, or
deny one another's success ? If, as our critics
proudly claim, we Americans have a quicker
perception of the ludicrous, the English have
a finer standard by which to judge its worth.
If we, as a nation, have more humor, they
have better humorists, and can point serenely
to those unapproached and unapproachable
writers of the eighteenth century, whose splen-
did ringing laughter still clears the murky air.
It is true, I am told now and then, with com-
mendable gravity, that such mirth is unbecom-
ing in a refined and critical age, and that, if I
would try a little harder to follow the some-
what elusive satire of the modern analyst, I
should enjoy a species of pleasantry too deli-
cate or too difficult for laughter. I hesitate to
affirm coarsely in reply that I like to laugh,
because it is possible to be deeply humiliated
by the contempt of one's fellow-creatures. It
is possible also to be sadly confused by new
theories and new standards; by the people
who tell me that exaggerated types, like Mr.
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 103
Micawber and. Mrs. Gamp, are not amusing,
and by the critics who are so good as to reveal
to me the depths of my own delusions. " We
have long ago ceased to be either surprised,
grieved, or indignant at anything the English
say of us," writes Mr. Charles Dudley War-
ner. " We have recovered our balance. We
know that since ' Gulliver ' there has been no
piece of original humor produced in England
equal to Knickerbocker's * New York ; ' that
not in this century has any English writer
equaled the wit and satire of the ' Biglow Pa-
pers.
Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers
Washington Irving to be the equal of Jona-
than Swift ; that he places the gentle satire of
the American alongside of those trenchant
and masterly pages which constitute the land-
marks of literature ? " Swift," says Dr. John-
son, with reluctant truthf idness, " must be al-
lowed for a time to have dictated the political
opinions of the English nation." He is a
writer whom we may be permitted to detest,
but not to undervalue. His star, red as Mars,
still flames fiercely in the horizon, while the
genial lustre of Washington Irving grows
104 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
dimmer year by year. We can never hope to
" recover our balance " by confounding values,
a process of self-deception which misleads no
one but ourselves.
Curiously enough, at least one Englishman
may be found who cordially agrees with Mr-
Warner. The Rev. R. H. Haweis has en-
riched the world with a little volume on Amer-
ican humorists, in which he kindly explains a
great deal which we had thought tolerably
clear already, as, for example, why Mark
Twain is amusing. The authors whom Mr.
Haweis has selected to illustrate his theme are
Washington Irving, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Lowell,
Artemus Ward, Mark Twain and Bret Harte ;
and he arranges this somewhat motley group
into a humorous round-table, where all hold
equal rank. He is not only generous, he is
strictly impartial in his praise ; and manifests
the same cordial enthusiasm for Boston's " Au-
tocrat" and for "The Innocents Abroad."
Artemus Ward's remark to his hesitating au-
dience: "Ladies and gentlemen! You can-
not expect to go in without paying your
money, but you can pay your money without
going in," delights our kindly critic beyond
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 105
measure. "Was there ever a wittier motto
than this ? " he asks, with such good-natured
exultation that we have a vague sense of self-
reproach at not being more diverted by the
pleasantry.
Now Mr. Haweis, guided by that dangerous
instinct which drives us on to unwarranted
comparisons, does not hesitate to link the
fame of Knickerbocker's "New York" with
the fame of " Gulliver's Travels," greatly to
the disadvantage of the latter. " Irving," he
gravely declares, " has all the satire of Swift,
without his sour coarseness." It would be as
reasonable to say, " Apollinaris has all the vi-
vacity of brandy, without its corrosive insalu-
brity." The advantages of Apollinaris are
apparent at first sight. It sparkles pleasantly,
it is harmless, it is refreshing, it can be con-
sumed in large quantities without any partic-
ular result. Its merits are incontestible ; but
when all is said, a few of us still remember
Dr. Johnson — " Brandy, sir, is a drink for
heroes ! " The robust virility of Swift places
him forever at the head of English-speaking
satirists. Unpardonable as is his coarseness,
shameful as is his cynicism, we must still
106 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
agree with Carlyle that his humor, "cased,
like Ben Jonson's, in a most hard and bitter
rind," is too genuine to be always unloving
and malign.
The truth is that, when not confused by
critics, we Americans have a sense of propor-
tion as well as a sense of humor, and our keen
appreciation of a jest serves materially to mod-
ify our national magniloquence, and to lessen
our national self-esteem. We are good-tem-
pered, too, where this humor is aroused, and
so the frank ignorance of foreigners, the au-
dacious disparagement of our fellow country-
men, are accepted with equal serenity. News-
papers deem it their duty to lash themselves
into patriotic rage over every affront, but news-
paper readers do not. Surely it is a generous
nation that so promptly forgave Dickens for
the diverting malice of " Martin Chuzzlewit."
I heard once a young Irishman, who was going
to the World's Fair, ask a young Englishman,
who had been, if the streets of Chicago were
paved, and the question was hailed with cour-
teous glee by the few Americans present. Bet-
ter still, I had the pleasure of listening to a
citizen of Seattle, who was describing to a
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 107
group of his townspeople the glories of the
Fair, and the magnitude of the city which had
brought it to such a triumphant conclusion.
" Chicago, gentlemen," said' this enthusiastic
traveler in a burst of final eloquence, " Chi-
cago is the Seattle of Illinois." The splendid
audacity of this commended it as much to one
city as to the other ; and when it was repeated
in Chicago, it was received with that frank
delight which proves how highly we value the
blessed privilege of laughter.
Perhaps it is our keener sense of humor
which prompts America to show more honor
to her humorists than England often grants.
Perhaps it is merely because we are in the
habit of according to all our men of letters a
larger share of public esteem than a more cri-
tical or richly endowed nation would think
their labors merited. Perhaps our humorists
are more amusing than their English rivals.
Whatever may be the cause, it is un-
doubtedly true that we treat Mr. Stockton
with greater deference than England treats
Mr. Anstey. We have illustrated articles
about him in our magazines, and incidents of
his early infancy are gravely narrated, as
108 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
likely to interest the whole reading public.
Now Mr. Anstey might have passed his
infancy in an egg, for all the English maga-
zines have to tell us on the subject. His
books are bought, and read, and laughed over,
and laid aside, and when there is a bitter ca-
dence in his mirth, people are disappointed
and displeased. England has always expected
her jesters to wear the cap and bells. She
would have nothing but foolish fun from
Hood, sacrificing his finer instincts and his
better parts on the shrine of her own ruthless
desires, and yielding him scant return for the
lifelong vassalage she exacted. It is fitting
that an English humorist should have written
the most sombre, the most heart-breaking, the
most beautiful and consoling of tragic stories.
Du Maurier in " Peter Ibbetson " has taught
to England the lesson she needed to learn.
The best-loved workers of every nation are
those who embody distinctly national charac-
teristics, whose work breathes a spirit of whole-
some national prejudice, who are children of
their own soil, and cannot, even in fancy, be
associated with any other art or literature
save the art or literature of their fatherland.
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 109
This was the case with honest John Leech,
.whom England took to her heart and held
dear because he was so truly English, because
he despised Frenchmen, and mistrusted Irish-
men, and hated Jews, and had a splendid
British frankness in conveying these various
impressions to the world. What would Leech
have thought of Peter Ibbetson watching with
sick heart the vessels bound for France !
What a contrast between the cultured sym-
pathy of Du Maimer's beautiful drawings,
and the real, narrow affection which Leech
betrays even for his Staffordshire roughs, who
are British roughs, be it rememberd, and not
without their stanch and sturdy British vir-
tues. He does not idealize them in any way.
He is content to love them as they are.
Neither does Mr. Barrie endeavor to describe
Thrums as a place where any but Thrums
people could ever have found life endurable ;
yet he is as loyal in his affection for that for-
bidding little hamlet as if it were Florence the
fair. Bret Harte uses no alluring colors
with which to paint his iniquitous mining
camps, but he is the brother at heart of every
gambler and desperado in the diggings. Hu-
110 IK TEE DOZY HOURS.
manity is a mighty bond, and nationality
strengthens its fibres. We can no more ima*
gine Bret Harte amid Jane Austen's placid
surroundings, than we can imagine Dr.
Holmes in a mining-camp, or Henry Fielding
in Boston. Just as the Autocrat springs
from Puritan ancestors, and embodies the in-
tellectual traditions of New England, so Tom
Jones, in his riotous young manhood, springs
from that lusty Saxon stock, of whose courage,
truthfulness, and good-tempered animalism
he stands the most splendid representative.
" The old order is passed and the new arises ; "
but Sophia Western has not yet yielded her
place in the hearts of men to the morbid and
self-centred heroines of modern fiction. Truest
of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any
other humorist, more than any other man of
letters, perhaps, belongs exclusively to his
own land, and is without trace or echo of
foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not
a place where the finest prose is written,
but a place where he ate frogs — " the
nicest little delicate things — rabbity-flavored.
Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit." Germany was
little or nothing, and America was less. The
child of London streets,
HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. Ill
" Mother of mightier, nurse of Done more dear/'
rich in the splendid literature of England, and
faithful lover both of the teeming city and the
ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts
in a language they can understand. And we,
his neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold
him just as dear ; for his spleenless humor is
an inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the
munificent gifts which England shares with us,
and for which no payment is possible save the
frank and generous recognition of a pleasure
that is without peer.
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY: A
SPECULATION.
Mr. Frederick Harrison, in a caustic little
paper on the JEsthete, has taken occasion to
say some severely truthful things anent the
dreary grandeur of rich men's houses, where
each individual object is charming in itself,
and out of harmony with all the rest. " I be-
lieve," he observes sadly, " that the camel will
have passed through the eye of the needle
before the rich man shall have found his way
to enter the Kingdom of Beauty. It is a hard
thing for him to enjoy art at all. The habits
of the age convert him into a patron, and the
assiduity of the dealers deprive him of peace."
Is it, then, the mere desire to be obliging
which induces a millionaire to surround him-
self with things which he does not want, which
nobody else wants, and which are perpetually
in the way of comfort and pleasure ? Does he
build and furnish his house to support the
dealers, to dazzle his friends, or to increase his
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY. 113
own earthly happiness and well-being ? The
serious fashion in which he goes to work ad-
mits of no backsliding, no merciful deviations
from a relentless luxury. I have seen ghastly
summer palaces, erected presumably for rest
and recreation, where the miserable visitor was
conducted from a Japanese room to a Dutch
room, and thence to something Early English
or Florentine ; and such a jumble of costly
incongruities, of carved scrolls and blue tiles
and bronze screens and stained glass, was
actually dubbed a home. A home ! The guest,
surfeited with an afternoon's possession, could
escape to simpler scenes ; but the master of
the house was chained to all that tiresome
splendor for five months of the year, and the
sole compensation he appeared to derive from
it was the saturnine delight of pointing out to
small processions of captive friends every de-
tail which they would have preferred to over-
look. It is a painful thing, at best, to live up
to one's bricabrac, if one has any ; but to live
up to the bricabrac of many lands and of many
centuries is a strain which no wise man would
dream of inflicting upon his constitution.
Perhaps the most unlovely circumstance
114 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
about the " palatial residences " of our coun-
try is that everything in them appears to
have been bought at once. Everything
is equally new, and equally innocent of any
imprint of the owner's personality. He has
not lived among his possessions long enough
to mould them to his own likeness, and very
often he has not even selected them himself.
I have known whole libraries purchased in a
week, and placed en masse upon their des-
tined shelves ; whole rooms furnished at one
fell swoop with all things needful, from the
chandelier in the ceiling to the Dresden fig-
ures in the cabinet. I have known people
who either mistrusted their own tastes, or
who had no tastes to mistrust, and so sur-
rendered their houses to upholsterers and
decorators, giving them carte blanche to do
their best or worst. A room which has been
the unresisting prey of an upholsterer is, on
the whole, the saddest thing that money ever
bought ; yet its deplorable completeness calls
forth rapturous commendations from those
who can understand no natural line of demar-
cation between a dwelling-place and a shop.
The same curious delight in handsome things,
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY. 115
apart from any beauty or fitness, has resulted
in our over-ornamented Pullman cars, with
their cumbrous and stuffy hangings; and
in the aggressive luxury of our ocean steam-
ers, where paint and gilding run riot, and
every scrap of wall space bears its burden
of inappropriate decoration. To those for
whom a sea voyage is but a penitential pil-
grimage, the fat frescoed Cupids and pink
roses of the saloons offer no adequate com-
pensation for their sufferings ; whitewash
and hangings of sackcloth would harmonize
more closely with their sentiments. Yet
these ornate embellishments pursue them now
even to the solitude of their staterooms, and
the newest steamers boast of cabins where
the wretched traveler, too ill to arise from
his berth, may be solaced by Cupids of his
own frisking nakedly over the wash-bowl,
and by pink roses in profusion festooning
his narrow cell. If he can look at them
without loathing, he is to be envied his
unequaled serenity of mind.
It is strange that the authors who have
written so much about luxury, whether they
praise it satirically, like Mandeville, or con-
116 IN THE DOZY HOURS,
demn it very seriously, like Mr. Goldwin
Smith, or merely inquire into its history and
traditions, like that careful scholar, M. Bau-
drillart, should never have been struck with
the amount of discomfort it entails. In mod-
ern as in ancient times, the same zealous pur-
suit of prodigality results in the same heavy
burden of undesirable possessions. The
youthful daughter of Marie Antoinette was
allowed, we are told, four pairs of shoes a
week; and M. Taine, inveighing bitterly
against the extravagances of the French
court, has no word of sympathy to spare for
the unfortunate little princess, condemned by
this ruthless edict always to wear new shoes.
Louis XVI. had thirty doctors of his own;
but surely no one will be found to envy him
this royal superfluity. He also had a hun-
dred and fifty pages, who were probably a
terrible nuisance ; and two chair-carriers, who
were paid twenty thousand livres a year to
inspect his Majesty's chairs, which duty they
solemnly performed twice a day, whether
they were wanted or not. The Cardinal de
Rohan had all his kitchen utensils of solid
silver, which must have given as much satis-
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY. Ill
faction to his cooks as did Nero's golden
fishing-hooks to the fish he caught with them.
M. Baudrillart describes the feasts of Elaga-
balus as if their only fault was their excess ;
but the impartial reader, scanning each unpal-
atable detail, comes to a different conclusion.
Thrushes' brains, and parrots' heads, peas
mashed with grains of gold, beans fricasseed
with morsels of amber, and rice mixed with
pearls do not tempt one's fancy as either
nourishing or appetizing diet; while the
crowning point of discomfort was reached
when revolving roofs threw down upon the
guests such vast quantities of roses that
they were well-nigh smothered. Better a
dish of herbs, indeed, than all this dubious
splendor. Nothing less enjoyable could have
been invented in the interests of hospitality,
save only that mysterious banquet given by
Solomon the mighty, where all the beasts of
the earth and all the demons of the air were
summoned by his resistless talisman to do
honor to the terrified and miserable ban-
queters.
" Le Superflu, chose tres-necessaire," to
quote Voltaire's delightful phrase, is a diffi-
118 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
cult thing to handle with propriety and grace.
Where the advantages of early training and
inherited habits of indulgence are lacking,
men who endeavor to spend a great deal of
money show a pitiful incapacity for the task.
They spend it, to be sure, but only in aug-
menting their own and their neighbors' dis-
comfort ; and even this they do in a blunder-
ing, unimaginative fashion, almost painful to
contemplate. The history of Law's Bubble,
with its long train of fabulous and fleeting
fortunes, illustrates the helplessness of men to
cope with suddenly acquired wealth. The
Parisian nabob who warmed up a ragout with
burning bank notes, that he might boast of
how much it cost him, was sadly stupid for a
Frenchman; but he was kinder to himself,
after all, than the house-painter who, bewil-
dered with the wealth of Fortunatus, could
think of nothing better to do with it than to
hire ninety supercilious domestics for his own
misusage and oppression. Since the days of
Darius, who required thirty attendants to
make his royal bed, there probably never were
people more hopelessly in one another's way
than that little army of ninety servants await-
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY. 119
ing orders from an artisan. The only crea-
ture capable of reveling in such an establish-
ment was the author of " Coningsby " and
" Lothair," to whom long rows of powdered
footmen, " glowing in crimson liveries," were
a spectacle as exhilarating as is a troop of
Horse Guards to persons of a more martial
cast of mind. Readers of " Lothair " will re-
member the home-coming of that young gen-
tleman to Muriel Towers, where the house
steward, and the chief butler, and the head
gardener, and the lord of the kitchen, and the
head forester, and the grooms of the stud and
of the chambers stand in modest welcome be-
hind the distinguished housekeeper, " who
curtsied like the old court ; " while the under-
lings await at a more " respectful distance "
the arrival of their youthful master, whose
sterling insignificance must have been pain-
fully enhanced by all this solemn anticipation.
" Even the mountains fear a rich man," says
that ominous Turkish proverb which breathes
the corruption of a nation ; but it would have
been a chicken-hearted molehill that trembled
before such a homunculus as Lothair.
The finer adaptability of women makes
120 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
them a little less uncomfortable amid such
oppressive surroundings, and their tamer
natures revolt from ridiculous excess. They
listen, indeed, with favor to the counsel of
Polonius, and their habit is occasionally
costlier than their purses can buy; witness
that famous milliner's bill for fifteen thou-
sand pounds, which was disputed in the
French courts during the gilded reign of
Napoleon III. But, as a rule, the punish-
ment of their extravagances falls on them-
selves or on their husbands. They do not,
as is the fashion with men, make their be-
longings a burden to their friends. It is
seldom the mistress of a curio-laden house
who insists with tireless perseverance on
your looking at everything she owns ; though
it was a woman, and a provincial actress
at that, raised by two brilliant marriages
to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, who
came to Abbotsford accompanied by a whole
retinue of servants and several private physi-
cians, to the mingled amusement and de-
spair of Sir Walter. And it was a flower
girl of Paris who spent her suddenly acquired
wealth in the most sumptuous entertainments
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY. 121
ever known even to that city of costly caprice.
But for stupid and meaningless luxury we
must look, after all, to men: to Caligula,
whose horse wore a collar of pearls, and drank
out of an ivory trough ; to Conde, who spent
three thousand crowns for jonquils to deck
his palace at Chantilly; to the Duke of
Albuquerque, who had forty silver ladders
among his utterly undesirable possessions.
Even in the matter of dress and fashion,
they have exceeded the folly of women.
It is against the gallants of Spain, and not
against their wives, that the good old gossip
James Howell inveighs with caustic humor.
The Spaniard, it would seem, "tho' perhaps
he had never a shirt to his back, yet must he
have a toting huge swelling ruff around his
neck," for the starching of which exquisitely
uncomfortable article he paid the then enor-
mous sum of twenty shillings. It was found
necessary to issue a royal edict against these
preposterous decorations, which grew larger
and stiffer every year, even children of tender
age wearing their miniature instruments of
torture. " Poverty is a most odious calling,"
sighs Burton with melancholy candor ; but it
s
122 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
is not without some small compensations of
its own. To realize them, we might compare
one of Murillo's dirty, smiling, half-naked
beggar boys with an Infanta by Velasquez, or
with M oreelzee's charming and unhappy little
Princess, who, in spreading ruff and stiff pearl-
trimmed stomacher, gazes at us with childish
dignity from the wall of Amsterdam's mu-
seum. Or we might remember the pretty
story of Meyerbeer's little daughter, who,
after watching for a long time the gambols of
some ragged children in the street, turned
sadly from the window, and said, with pathetic
resignation, " It is a great misfortune to have
genteel parents."
LECTURES.
" Few of us," says Mr. Walter Bagehot in
one of his most cynical moods, " can bear the
theory of our amusements. It is essential to
the pride of man to believe that he is indus-
trious/'
Now, is it industry or a love of sport which
makes us sit in long and solemn rows in an
oppressively hot room, blinking at glaring
lights, breathing a vitiated air, wriggling on
straight and narrow chairs, and listening, as
well as heat and fatigue and discomfort will
permit, to a lecture which might just as well
have been read peacefully by our own firesides ?
Do we do this thing for amusement, or for in-
tellectual gain? Outside, the winter sun is
setting clearly in a blue-green sky. People
are chatting gayly in the streets. Friends are
drinking cups of fragrant tea in pleasant lamp-
lit rooms. There are concerts, perhaps, or
matinees, where the deft comedian provokes
continuous laughter. No ; it is not amusement
124 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
that we seek in the lecture-hall. Too many
really amusing things may be done on a winter
afternoon. Too many possible pleasures lie
in wait for every spare half-hour. We can
harbor no delusions on that score.
Is it industry, then, that packs us side by side
in serried Amazonian ranks, broken here and
there by a stray and downcast man ? But on
the library shelves stand thick as autumn
leaves the unread books. Hidden away in
obscure corners are the ripe old authors whom
we know by name alone. The mist of an un-
spoken tongue veils from us the splendid
treasures of antiquity, and we comfort our-
selves with glib commonplaces about "the
sympathetic study of translations." No ; it
can hardly be the keen desire of culture which
makes us patient listeners to endless lectures.
Culture is not so easy of access. It is not a
thing passed lightly from hand to hand. It is
the reward of an intelligent quest, of delicate
intuitions, of a broad and generous sympathy
with all that is best in the world. It has been
nobly defined by Mr. Symonds as " the raising
of the intellectual faculties to their highest po-
tency by means of conscious training." We
LECTURES-. 125
cannot gain this fine mastery over ourselves by
absorbing — or forgetting — amass of details
upon disconnected subjects, — "a thousand
particulars," says Addison, " which I would
not have my mind burdened with for a
Vatican." If we will sit down and seri-
ously try to reckon up our winnings in
years of lecture-going, we may yet find our-
selves reluctant converts to Mr. Bagehot's
cruel conclusions. It is the old, old search for
a royal road to learning. It is the old, old
effort at a compromise which cheats us out
of both pleasure and profit. It is the old, old
determination to seek some short cut to
acquirements, which, like "conversing with
ingenious men," may save us, says Bishop
Berkeley, from " the drudgery of reading and
thinking."
The necessity of knowing a little about a
great many things is the most grievous burden
of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the
one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
At times we envy the happy Hermit of Prague,
who never saw pen or ink ; at times we think
somewhat wistfully of the sedate and dignified
methods of the past, when students, to use Sir
126 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Walter Scott's illustration, paid their tickets
at the door, instead of scrambling over the
walls to distinction. It shows a good deal of
agility and self-reliance to scale the walls ; and
such athletic interlopers, albeit a trifle dis-
ordered in appearance, are apt to boast of
their unaided prowess : how with " little Latin
and less Greek" they have become — not
Shakespeares indeed, nor even Scotts — but
prominent, very prominent citizens indeed.
The notion is gradually gaining ground that
common-school education is as good as col-
lege education; that extension lectures and
summer classes are acceptable substitutes
for continuous study and mental discipline;
that reading translations of the classics is
better, because easier, than reading the
classics themselves ; and that attending a
"Congress" of specialists gives us, in some
mysterious fashion, a very respectable know-
ledge of their specialties. It is after this man-
ner that we enjoy, in all its varied aspects, that
energetic idleness which Mr. Bagehot recom-
mends as a deliberate sedative for our restless
self-esteem.
Yet the sacrifice of time alone is worth some
LECTURES. 127
sorrowful consideration. We laugh at the
droning pedants of the old German universities
who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, had well-nigh drowned the world with
words. The Tubingen chancellor, Penziger,
gave, it is said, four hundred and fifty-nine
lectures on the prophet Jeremiah, and over
fifteen hundred lectures on Isaiah ; while the
Viennese theologian, Hazelbach, lectured for
twenty-two consecutive years on the first chap-
ter of Isaiah, and was cruelly cut off by death
before he had finished with his theme. But
the bright side of this picture is that only stu-
dents — and theological students at that —
attended these limitless dissertations. Theol-
ogy was then a battle-field, and the heavy
weapons forged for the combat were presumed
to be as deadly as they were cumbersome.
During all those twenty-two years in which
Herr Hazelbach held forth so mercilessly, Ger-
man maidens and German matrons formed no
part of his audience. They at least had other
and better things to do. German artisans and
German tradesmen troubled themselves little
about Isaiah. German ploughmen went about
their daily toil as placidly as if Herr Hazelbach
128 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
had been born a mute. The sleepy world had
not then awakened to its duty of disseminating
knowledge broadcast and in small doses, so
that our education, as Dr. Johnson discontent-
edly observed of the education of the Scotch,
is like bread in a besieged town, — "every
man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal."
What we lack in quantity, however, we are
pleased to make up in variety. We range
freely over a mass of subjects from the reli-
gion of the Phoenicians to the poets of Austra-
lia, and from the Song of Solomon to the
latest electrical invention. We have lectures
in the morning upon Plato and Aristotle, and
in the afternoon upon Emerson and Arthur
Hugh Clough. We take a short course of
German metaphysics, — which is supposed to
be easily compressed into six lectures, — and
follow it up immediately with another on
French art, or the folk-lore of the North
American Indians. No topic is too vast to be
handled deftly, and finished up in a few after-
noons. A fortnight for the Renaissance, a
week for Greek architecture, ten days for
Chaucer, three weeks for anthropology. It is
amazing how far we can go in a winter, when
LECTURES. 129
we travel at this rate of speed. " What
under the sun is bringing all the women after
Hegel?" asked a puzzled librarian not very
long ago. " There is n't one of his books left
in the library, and twenty women come in a
day to ask for him." It was explained to this
custodian that a popular lecturer had been
dwelling with some enthusiasm upon Hegel,
and that the sudden demand for the philoso-
pher was a result of his contagious eloquence.
It seemed for the nonce like a revival of pan-
theism; but in two weeks every volume was
back in its place, and the gray dust of neglect
was settling down as of yore upon each hoary
head. The women, fickle as in the days of
the troubadours, had wandered far from Ger-
man erudition, and were by that time wrest-
ling with the Elizabethan poets, or the
constitutional history of republics. The sun
of philosophy had set.
One rather dismal result of this rapid tran-
sit is the amount of material which each
lecture is required to hold, and which each
lecture-goer is expected to remember. A few
centuries of Egyptian history or of Mediaeval
song are packed down by some system of
130 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
mental hydraulic pressure into a single hour's
discourse; and, when they escape, they seem
vast enough to fill our lives for a week.
"When Macaulay talks," complained Lady
Ashburton tartly, " I am not only overflowed
with learning, but I stand in the slops." We
have much the same uncomfortable sensation
at an afternoon lecture, when the tide of in-
formation, of dry, formidable, relentless facts,
rises higher and higher, and our spirits sink
lower and lower with every fresh develop-
ment. " The need of limit, the feasibility of
performance," has not yet dawned upon the
new educators who have taken the world in
hand; and, as a consequence, we, the stu-
dents, have never learned to survey our own
intellectual boundaries. We assume in the
first place that we have an intelligent interest
in literature, science, and history, art, archi-
tecture, and archaeology ; and, in the second,
that it is possible for us to learn a moderate
amount about all these things without any un-
reasonable exertion. This double delusion
lures us feebly on until we have listened to so
much, and remembered so little, that we are a
good deal like the infant Paul Dombey won-
LECTURES. 19L
dering in pathetic perplexity whether a verb
always agreed with an ancient Briton, or
three times four was Taurus a bull.
" When all can read, and books are plenti- ^
ful, lectures are unnecessary," says Dr. John-
son, who hated " by-roads in education," and
novel devices — or devices which were novel a
hundred and thirty years ago — for softening
and abridging hard study. / He hated also to
be asked the kind of questions which we are
now so fond of answering in the columns of
our journals and magazines. What should a
child learn first? How should a boy be
taught? What course of study would he
recommend an intelligent youth to pursue?
"Let him take a course of chemistry, or a
course of rope-dancing, or a course of any-
thing to which he is inclined," was the great
scholar's petulant reply to one of these re-
peated inquiries ; and, though it sounds ill-na-
tured, we have some human sympathy for
the pardonable irritation which prompted it.
Dr. Johnson, I am well aware, is not a popu-
lar authority to quote in behalf of any cause
one wishes to advance ; but his heterodoxy in
the matter of lectures is supported openly by
132 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Charles Lamb, and furtively by some living
men of letters, who strive, though with no
great show of temerity, to stem the ever-in-
creasing current of popular instruction. One
eminent scholar, being entreated to deliver a
course of lectures on a somewhat abstruse
theme, replied that if people really desired
information on that subject, and if they could
read, he begged to refer them to two books he
had written several years before. By perus-
ing these volumes, which were easy of access,
they would know all that he once knew, and a
great deal more than he knew at the present
time, as he had unhappily forgotten much
that was in them. It would be simpler, he
deemed, and it would be cheaper, than bring-
ing him across the ocean to repeat the same
matter in lectures.
As for Lamb, we have not only his frankly
stated opinion, but — what is much more
diverting — we have also the unconscious con-
fession of a purely human weakness with
which it is pleasant to sympathize. Like all
the rest of us, this charming and fallible
genius found that heroic efforts in the future
cost less than very moderate exertions in the
LECTURES. 133
present. He was warmly attached to Cole-
ridge, and he held him in sincere veneration.
When the poet came to London in 1816, we
find Lamb writing to Wordsworth very en-
thusiastically, and yet with a vague under-
current of apprehension : —
"Coleridge is absent but four miles, and
the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting
as the presence of fifty ordinary persons.
' T is enough to be within the whiff and wind
of his genius for us not to possess our souls in
quiet. If I lived with him, or with the author
of * The Excursion,' I should in a very little
time lose my own identity, and be dragged
along in the currents of other people's
thoughts, hampered in a net."
This is well enough by way of anticipation ;
but later on, when Coleridge is a fixed star in
the London skies, and is preparing to give his
lectures on Shakespeare and English poetry,
Lamb's kind heart warms to his perpetually
impecunious friend. He writes now to Payne
Collier, with little enthusiasm, but with great
earnestness, bespeaking his interest and assist-
ance. He reminds Collier of his friendship
and admiration for Coleridge, and bids him re-*
134 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
member that he and all his family attended
the poet's lectures five years before. He tells
him alluringly that this is a brand-new course,
with nothing metaphysical about it, and adds :
" There are particular reasons just now, and
have been for the last twenty years, why he
[Coleridge] should succeed. He will do so
with a little encouragement."
Doubtless ; but it is worthy of note that the
next time the subject is mentioned is in a letter
to Mrs. Wordsworth, written more than two
months later. The lectures are now in prog-
ress ; very successful, we hear ; but — Lamb
has been to none of them. He intends to go
soon, of course, — so do we always ; but, in
the mean while, he is treating resolution with a
good deal of zest, and making the best plea he
can for his defalcation. With desperate
candor he writes : —
" I mean to hear some of the course, but
lectures are not much to my taste, whatever
the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal
flat, and you can't think why you are brought
together to hear a man read his works, which
you could read so much better at leisure your-
self. If delivered extempore, I am always in
LECTURES. 135
pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly
fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at
the dinner given in honor of me at the Lon-
don, Tavern. 4 Gentlemen,' said I, and there I
stopped ; the rest my feelings were under the
necessity of supplying."
We can judge pretty well from this letter
just how many of those lectures on Shake-
speare Lamb was likely to hear ; and all
doubts are set at rest when we find Coleridge,
the following winter, endeavoring to lure his re-
luctant friend to another course by the presen-
tation of a complimentary ticket. Even this
device fails of its wonted success. Lamb is
eloquent in thanks, and lame in excuses. He
has been in an "incessant hurry." He was
unable to go on the evening he was expected
because it was the night of Kenney's new
comedy, "which has utterly failed," — this is
mentioned as soothing to Coleridge's wounded
feelings. He has mistaken his dates, and sup-
posed there would be no lectures in Christmas
week. He is as eager to vindicate himself as
Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond, and he is as
sanguine as ever about the future. " I trust,"
he writes, " to hear many a course yet ; " and
136 IN THE DOZY HO UBS.
with this splendid resolution, which is made
without a pang, he wanders brightly off to a
more engaging topic.
It is a charming little bit of comedy, and
has, withal, such a distinctly modern touch,
that we might fancy it enacted in this year
of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-four by
any of our weak and erring friends.
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED.
In these days of grace when all manner of
evil-doers have their apologists ; when we are
bidden to admire the artistic spirit of Nero
and the warm-hearted integrity of Henry the
Eighth; when a "cult for Domitian" and a
taste for Nihilists contend with each other in
our estimation; it may not be ill-timed nor
unduly venturesome to offer a few modest ar-
guments in behalf of those Pariahs of modern
literature, the anonymous reviewers of the
press. They have been harshly abused for so
many years. They have been targets for the
wrath of authors, the scorn of satirists, the
biting comments of injured genius. And now,
when milder manners and gentler modes of
speech are replacing the vigorous Billingsgate
of our ancestors ; when theologians and politi-
cians make war upon one another with some
show of charity and discretion, the reviewer
alone is excluded from this semblance of good-
will, the reviewer alone — a thing apart from
138 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
brotherhood — is pelted as openly as ever.
The stones that are cast at him are so big and
so hard that if he still lives, and, in a mild
way, even flourishes, it must be because of his
own irritating obtusiveness, because of his un-
pardonable reluctance to come forward decently
and be killed.
Now, when I read the list of his misdeeds,
as they are set forth categorically by irate
novelists and poets, when I hear of his " fero-
city, incompetence and dishonesty," I am filled
with heroic indignation and with craven fear.
But when I turn from these scathing com-
ments to a few columns of book notices, and
see for myself the amiable effort that is made
in them to say something reasonably pleasant
about every volume, I begin to think that Mr.
Lang is right when he complains that the ordi-
nary anonymous reviewer is, as the Scotch lassie
said of a modest lover, " senselessly ceevil,"
good-natured and forbearing to a fault. If he
sins, it is through indifference, and not through
brutality. He is more anxious to spare him-
self than to attack his author. He has that
provoking charity which is based upon uncon-
cern, and he looks upon a book with a gentle
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED. 139
and weary tolerance, fatal alike to animosity
and enthusiasm. To understand the annoy-
ance provoked by this mental attitude, we
must remember that the work which is thus
carelessly handled is, in its writer's eyes, a
thing sacred and apart ; with faults perhaps, —
no great book being wholly free from them, —
but illustrating some particular attitude
towards life, which places it beyond the pale
of common, critical jurisprudence. Even the
novelist of to-day sincerely believes that his
point of view, his conception of his own art,
and the lesson he desires to enforce are matters
of vital interest to the public ; and that it is
crass ignorance on the reviewer's part to ignore
these considerations, and to class his master-
piece with the companion stories of less self-
conscious men. What is the use of superbly
discarding all models, and of thanking Heaven
daily one does not resemble Fielding and Scott,
and Thackeray, if one cannot escape after all
from the standards which these great men
erected ?
It is urged also against newspaper critics
that they read only a small portion of the
books which they pretend to criticise. This,
140 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
I believe, is true, and it accounts for the good-,
humor and charity they display. If they read
the whole, we should have a band of misan-
thropes who would spare neither age nor sex,
and who would gain no clearer knowledge of
their subjects through this fearful sacrifice of
time and temper. " To know the vintage and
quality of a wine," says Mr. Oscar Wilde,
"one need not drink the whole cask. One
tastes it, and that is quite enough." More
than enough for the reviewer very often, but
too little to satisfy the author, who regards his
work as Dick Swiveller regarded beer, as
something not to be adequately recognized in
a sip. There is a secret and wholesome con-
viction in the heart of every man or woman
who has written a book that it should be no
easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay
down that book unfinished. There is a par-
donable impression among reviewers that half
an hour in its company is sufficient. This is
as much perhaps as they can afford to give it,
and to write a brief, intelligent, appreciative
notice of a partly read volume is not altoge-
ther the easy task it seems. That it is con-
stantly done, proves the reviewer to be a man
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED. 141
skilled in his petty craft ; but we are merely
paving the way to disappointment if we ex-
pect subtle analysis, or fervent eulogy, or even
very discriminating criticism from his pen. He
is not a Sainte-Beuve in the first place, and
he has not a week of leisure in the second. We
might console ourselves with the reflection
that if he were a great and scholarly critic
instead of an insignificant fellow-workman, our
little books would never meet his eye.
Another complaint lodged periodically by
discontents is that the author gains no real
light from the comments passed upon his work,
which are irritating and annoying without
being in the smallest degree helpful. This is
the substance of those sad grumblings which
we heard some years ago from Mr. Lewis
Morris ; and this is the argument offered by
Mr. Howells, who appears to think that Canon
Farrar dealt a death-blow to reviewers in the
simple statement that he never profited by
their reviews. But at whose door lay the
•
blame? It does not follow that, because a
lesson is unlearned, it has never been taught.
The Bourbons, it is said, gained nothing from
some of the sharpest admonitions ever given
142 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
by history. It is worth while to consider, in
this regard, an extract from the Journal of
Sir Walter Scott in which he mentions an
anonymous letter sent him from Italy, and full
of acute, acrid criticisms on the " Life of Bona-
parte." " The tone is decidedly hostile," says
Sir Walter calmly, " but that shall not pre-
vent my making use of all his corrections,
where just." It is a hard matter perhaps for
smaller men to preserve this admirable tran-
quillity under assault ; to say with Epictetus,
" He little knew of my other shortcomings or
he would not have mentioned these alone."
Yet after all, it is an advantage to be told
plainly what we need to know and cannot
see for ourselves. I am sure that the most
valuable lesson in literary perspective I ever
received came from an anonymous reviewer,
who reminded me curtly that " Mr. Saltus and
Leopardi are not twins of the intellect."
When I first saw that sentence I felt a throb
of indignation that any one should believe, or
affect to believe, that I ever for a moment sup-
posed Mr. Saltus and Leopardi were twins of
the intellect. Afterwards, when in calmer
mood I re-read the essay criticised, I was
BE VIE WEES AND REVIEWED. 143
forced to acknowledge that, if such were not my
conviction, I had, to say the least, been unfor-
tunate in my manner of putting things. I had
used the two names indiscriminately and as if I
thought one man every whit as worthy of illus-
trating my text as the other. Such moments
ought to be salutary, they are so eminently
cheerless. A disagreeable lesson, disagree-
ably imparted, is apt to be taken to heart with
very beneficial results. If it is wasted, the
fault does not lie with the surly truth-teller,
whose thankless task has been performed with
most ungracious efficacy. "Truth," says
Saville, " has become such a ruining virtue,
that mankind seems to be agreed to commend
and avoid it."
As for the real and exasperating fault of
much modern writing, its flippant and irrele-
vant cleverness, the critic and the reviewer
stand equally guilty of the charge. Mr. Gold-
win Smith observes that the province of criti-
cism appears to be now limited to the saying of
fine things ; and there are moments when we
feel that this unkind and forcible statement is
very nearly true. The fatal and irresistible
impulse to emit sparks — like the cat in the
144 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
fairy story —lures a man away from his sute
ject, and sends him dancing over pages in a
glittering fashion that is as useless as it is
pretty. It is amazing how brightly he shines,
but we see nothing by his light. " He uses
his topic," says Mr. Saintsbury, " as a spring-
board or platform on and from which to dis-
play his natural grace and agility, his urbane
learning, his faculty of pleasant wit." We
read, and laugh, and are entertained, and sel-
dom pause to ask ourselves exactly what it
was which the writer started out to accom-
plish.
Now the finest characteristic of all really
good criticism is its power of self -repression.
It is work within barriers, work which drives
straight to its goal, and does not permit itself
the luxury of meandering on either side of the
way. In this respect at least, it is possible
for the most modest of anonymous reviewers
to follow the example of the first of critics,
Sainte-Beuve, who never allowed himself to
be lured away from the subject in hand, and
never sacrificed exactness and perspicuity to
effect. If we compare his essay on the his-
torian Gibbon with one on the same subject
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED. 145
by Mr. Walter Bagehot, we will better under-
stand this admirable quality of restraint. Mr.
Bagehot's paper is delightful from beginning
to end; keen, sympathetic, humorous, and
sparkling all over with little brilliant asides
about Peel's Act, and the South Sea Com-
pany, and grave powdered footmen, and Louis
XIV., " carefully amusing himself with dreary
trifles." Underneath its whimsical exaggera-
tions we recognize clearly the truthful outlines
and general fidelity of the sketch. But Sainte-
Beuve indulges in none of these witty and
wandering fancies. He is keenly alive to the
proper limitations of his subject ; he has but a
single purpose in mind, that of helping you to
accurately understand the character and the
life's work of the great historian whom he is
reviewing ; and, while his humor plays lam-
bently on every page, he never makes any
conscious effort to be diverting. Nothing can
be more sprightly than Mr. Bagehot's account
of Gibbon's early conversion to the Church of
Borne, and of the horror and alarm he awoke
thereby at the manor-house of Buriton, where
" it would probably have occasioned less sen-
sation if ' dear Edward ' had announced his
146 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
intention of becoming a monkey." Nothing
can be more dexterous than Mr. Bagehot's
analysis of the cautious skepticism which re-
placed the brief religious fervor of youth.
But when we turn back to Sainte-Beuve, we
see this little sentence driven like an arrow-
point straight to the heart of the mystery.
" While he (Gibbon) prided himself on being
wholly impartial and indifferent where creeds
were concerned, he cherished, without avow-
ing it, a secret and cold spite against religious
thought, as if it were an adversary which had
struck him one day when unarmed, and had
wounded him." A secret and cold spite.
Were ever five short words more luminously
and dispassionately significant ?
A sense of proportion intrudes itself so
seldom into the popular criticism of to-day,
that it is hardly worth while to censure the
reviewer for not comprehending differences
of degree. How should he, when the whole
tone of modern sentiment is subversive of
order and distinction; when the generally
accepted opinion appears to be that we are
doing everything better than it was ever done
before, and have nothing to learn from any-
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED. 147
body ? This is a pleasant opinion to entertain,
but it is apt to be a little misleading. The
old gods are not so readily dislodged, and
their festal board is not a round table at
which all guests hold equal rank. If you
thrust Balzac or Tolstoi by the side of Shake-
speare, the great poet, it has been well said,
will, in his infinite courtesy, move higher and
make room. But you cannot bid them change
seats at your discretion. Parnassus is not the
exclusive pasture ground of the Frenchman or
of the Muscovite. " Homer often nods, but,
in ' Taras Bulba,' Gogol never nods," I read
not long ago in a review. The inference is
plain, and quite in harmony with much that
we hear every day; but how many times
already has Homer been outstripped by long
forgotten competitors! It is not indeed the
nameless critic of the newspapers who gives
utterance to these startling statements. They
are signed and countersigned in magazines,
and occasionally republished in fat volumes
for the comfort and enlightenment of poster-
ity. The real curiosities of criticism have
ever emanated from men bearing the symbol
of authority. It was no anonymous reviewer
148 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
who called Dante a " Methodist parson in
Bedlam," or who said that Wordsworth's
poetry would "never do," or who spoke of
the "caricaturist, Thackeray." It is no
anonymous reviewer now who bids us exult
and be glad over the " literary emancipation
of the West," as though that large and flour-
ishing portion of the United States had hith-
erto been held in lettered bondage.
In fact, as one's experience in these matters
increases day by day, one is fain to acknow-
ledge that the work of the unknown or little
known professional critic, faulty though it be,
has certain modest advantages over the simi-
lar work of his critics, the poets and novelists
when they take to the business of reviewing.
There are several very successful story-writers
who are just now handling criticism after a
fashion which recalls that delightful scene in
" The Monks of Thelema," where an effort to
make the village maidens vote a golden apple
to the prettiest of their number is frustrated
by the unforeseen contingency of each girl
voting for herself. In the same artless spirit,
the novelist turned critic confines his good
will so exclusively to his own work, or at best
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED. 149
to that school of fiction which his own work
represents, that, while we cannot sufficiently
admire his methods, we do not feel greatly
stimulated by their results. As for the poet
umpire, he is apt to bring an uncomfortable
degree of excitability to bear upon his task.
It is readily granted that Mr. Swinburne
manifests at times an exquisite critical dis-
cernment, and a broad sympathy for much
that is truly good ; but when less gifted souls
behold him foaming in Berserker wrath over
insignificant trifles, they are wont to ask them-
selves what in the world is the matter. We
can forgive him, or at least we can strive to
forgive him, for reviling Byron, snubbing
George Eliot, underrating George Sand,
ignoring Jane Austen, calling poor Steele a
"sentimental debauchee," and asserting that
the only two women worthy to stand by the
side of Charlotte Bronte," "the fiery-hearted
vestal of Haworth" — though why "vestal,"
only Mr. Swinburne knows — are her sister
Emily and Mrs. Browning. But when he
has been permitted to do all this and a great
deal more, why should he fall into a passion,
and use the strongest of strong language,
150 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
because there are details in which everybody
does not chance to agree with him? In so
wide a world there must of necessity be many
minds, and the opinions of a poet are not
always beacon fires to light us through the
gloom. Even the musician has been for
some time prepared to step into the critical
arena, and Mr. E. S. Dalios, in "The Gay
Science," quotes for us a characteristic extract
from Wagner, which probably means some-
thing, though only a very subtle intellect
could venture to say what.
"If we now consider the activity of the
poet more closely, we perceive that the real-
ization of his intention consists solely in ren-
dering possible the representation of the
strengthened actions of his poetized forms
through an exposition of their motives to the
feelings, as well as the motives themselves.
Also by an expression that in so far engrosses
his activity, as the invention and production
of this expression in truth first render the
introduction of such motives and actions pos-
sible."
After this splendid example of style and
lucidity, it may be that even the ordinary,
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED. 151
every-day, unostentatious reviewer whom we
so liberally despise will be admitted to possess
some few redeeming virtues.
And, in truth, patience is one of them.
Think of the dull books which lie piled upon
his table! Think how many they are, and
how long they are, and how alike they are,
and how serious they are, and how little we
ourselves would care to read them ! If the re-
viewer sometimes misses what is really good,
or praises what is really bad, this does not
mean that he is incompetent, dishonest, or
butcherly. It means that he is human, that
he is tired, perhaps a little peevish, and dis-
posed to think the world would be a merrier
place if there were fewer authors in it. The
new novelist or budding poet who comes for-
ward at this unpropitious moment is not
hailed with acclamations of delight ; while the
conscientious worker who has spent long
months in compiling the weighty memoirs of
departed mediocrity is outraged by the scant
attention he receives. Meanwhile the number
of books increases with fearful speed. Each
is the embodiment of a sanguine hope, and
each claims its meed of praise. A fallible
152 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
reviewer struggles with the situation as best
he can, saying pleasant things which are scan-
tily merited, and sharp things which are
hardly deserved; but striving intelligently,
and with tolerable success to tell a self-indul-
gent public something about the volumes
which it is too lazy to read for itself.
" dreams of the tongues that commend us,
Of crowns for the laureate pate.
Of a public to buy and befriend us,
Ye come through the Ivory Gate.
But the critics that slash us and slate,
But the people that hold us in scorn,
But the sorrow, the scathe, and the hate,
Through the portals of horn."
PASTELS : A QUERY.
I should like to be told by one of the
accomplished critics of the day what is — or
rather what is not — a pastel ? Dictionaries,
with their wonted rigidity, define the word
as " a colored crayon," ignoring its literary
significance, and affording us no clue to its
elusive and mutable characteristics. When Mr.
Stewart Merrill christened his pretty little
volume of translations " Pastels in Prose," he
gave us to understand, with the assistance of
Mr. Howells' prefatory remarks, that the
name was an apt one for those brief bits of
unrhymed, unrhythmical, yet highly poetic
composition in the execution of which the
French have shown such singular felicity and
grace. Some of these delicate trifles have
the concentrated completeness of a picture,
and for them the name is surely not ill-chosen.
Sombre, or joyous, or faintly ironical, they
bring before our eyes with vivid distinctness
every outline of the scene they portray.
154 ' IN THE DOZY HOURS.
" Padre Pugnaccio " and " Henriquez," by-
Louis Bertrand, and that strange lovely " Cap-
tive," by Ephrai'm Mikhael, are as admirable
I. ** lUui- . h »* M* Tk*
* show us one thing only, and show it with
swift yet comprehensive lucidity. But if
" Padre Pugnaccio " be a pastel, then, by that
same token, " Solitude " is not. It is a mod-
erately long and wholly allegorical story, and
its merits are of a different order. As for
Maurice de Guerin's " Centaur," that noble
fragment has nothing in common with the
fragile delicacy of the pretty little picture
poems which surround it. It is a masterpiece
of breadth and virility. Its sonorous sentences
recall the keener life of the antique world,
and it stands among its unsubstantial com-
panions like a bust of Hermes in a group of
Dresden figures, all charming, but all dwarfed
to insignificance by the side of that strong
young splendor. To call " The Centaur " a
pastel is as absurd as to call " Endymion " an
etching.
However, Mr. Merrill's translations are far
from defining the limits of the term. On the
contrary, we have M. Paul Bourget's group of
PASTELS: A QUERY. 155
stories, "Pastels of Men," which are not prose
poems at all, nor brief pen pictures ; but tales
of a rather elaborate and unclean order, full
of wan sentiment, and that cheerless vice which
robs the soul without gratifying the body.
Occasionally, as in the sketch of the poor old
teacher living his meagre life from hour to
hour, M. Bourget draws for us, with melan-
choly skill, a single scene from the painful
drama of existence. This is perhaps a pastel,
since the word must be employed ; but why
should an interminable and shifting tale about
a rich young widow, who cannot make up her
mind in less than a hundred pages which of
her four lovers she will marry, be called by
the same generic title? If it be equally
applicable to every kind of story, short or
long, simple or involved, descriptive or ana-
lytic, then it has no real meaning at all, and
becomes a mere matter of capricious selection.
" Wandering Willie's Tale," and " The Cricket
on the Hearth " could with propriety have
been termed pastels.
Nor does the matter stop here. In Mr.
Gome's recent volume of essays, he has in-
eluded two admirable criticisms on Mr. Robert
156 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Louis Stevenson's poetry, and on Mr. Rudyard
Kipling's prose. These papers, discriminating,
sympathetic, and exhaustive, are called pastels.
They do not differ in any way from other crit-
ical studies of equal length and merit. They
abound in agreeable quotations, and show a
clear and genial appreciation of their themes.
They are simply reviews of an unusually good
order, and if their title be correctly applied,
then it is serviceable for any piece of literary
criticism which deals with a single author.
Macaulay's " Madame D' Arblay," Mr. Birrell's
" Emerson," Mr. Saintsbury's " Peacock,"
might all have been named pastels.
By this time the subject begins to grow per-
plexing. Miss Wilkins wanders far from her
true gods, and from the sources of her genuine
inspiration, to write a handful of labored
sketches — pen pictures perhaps, albeit a trifle
stiff in execution — which she calls pastels.
Mr. Brander Matthews gives us, as his contri-
bution to the puzzle, a vivid description of
Carmencita dancing in a New York studio, and
calls it a pastel. If we stray from prose to
verse, we are tripped up at every step. Nebu-
lous little couplets, songs of saddening subtlety,
PASTELS: A QUERY. 157
weird conceits and high-pacing rhymes are
thoughtfully labeled pastels, so as to give us a
clue to their otherwise impenetrable obscurity.
Sullen seas, and wan twilights, and dim garden
paths, relieved with ghostly lilies, and white-
armed women of dubious decorum, are the
chief ingredients of these poetic novelties ; but
here is one, picked up by chance, which reads
like a genial conundrum : —
" The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom ;
It was dark in the little room.
Dark, and then in the dark.
Sudden, a flash, a glow,
And a hand and a ring I know.
And then, through the dark, a flush,
Ruddy and vague, the grace —
A rose — of her lyric face."
Now, if that be a pastel, and Mr. Gosse's
reviews are pastels, and M. Bourget's stories
are pastels, and Maurice de Guerin's " Cen-
taur " is a pastel, and Mr. Brander Matthews'
realistic sketches are pastels, and Ephraim
Mikhael's allegories are pastels, I should like
to be told, by some one who knows, just where
the limits of the term is set.
GUESTS.
A vert charming and vivacious old lady,
who had spent most of her early life in the
country, once said to me that the keenest
pleasure of her childhood was the occasional
arrival of her mother's guests; the keenest
regret, their inevitable and too speedy depar-
ture. " They seldom stayed more than a fort-
night," she observed, plaintively ; " though
now and then some cousins prolonged their
visits for another week. What I most en-
joyed on these occasions was the increased
good temper of my own family. Annoyances
were laughed at, our noisy behavior was over-
looked, conversation took an agreeable turn,
and a delightful air of cheerfulness and good
humor pervaded the entire household. It
seemed to my infant eyes that life would be a
matter of flawless enjoyment if we could only
have visitors always in the house."
A little of this frankly expressed sentiment
will find an echo in many hearts, and perhaps
GUESTS. 159
awaken some pangs of conscience on the way.
It is the restraint we put upon ourselves, the
honest effort we make at amiability, which
renders social intercourse possible and pleas-
ant. When the restraint grows irksome, the
amiability a burden, we pay to those we love
best on earth the dubious compliment of being
perfectly natural in their company. " What
is the use of having a family if you cannot be
disagreeable in the bosom of it?" was the
explicit acknowledgment I once overheard of a
service which seldom meets with such clear
and candid recognition. Hazlitt himself could
have given no plainer expression to a thought
which few of us would care to trick out in all
the undisguised sincerity of language.
Guests are the delight of leisure, and the
solace of ennui. It is the steady and merci-
less increase of occupations, the augmented
speed at which we are always trying to live,
the crowding of each day with more work and
amusement than it can profitably hold, which
have cost us, among other good things, the
undisturbed enjoyment of our friends. Friend-
ship takes time, and we have no time to give it.
We have to go to so many teas, and lectures,
160 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
and committee meetings ; we have taken up
so many interesting and exacting careers ; we
have assumed so many duties and responsibili-
ties, that there is not a spare corner in our
lives which we are free to fill up as we please.
Society, philanthropy, and culture divide our
waking hours. Defrauded friendship gets a
few moments now and again, and is bidden to
content itself, and please not to be troublesome
any more. I once rashly asked a girl of
twenty if she saw a great deal of a young mar-
ried woman whom she had just declared to be
her dearest and most cherished friend. "I
never see her at all," was the satisfied answer,
" except by chance, at a tea or a club meeting.
We live so very far apart, as you know. It
would take the heart of an afternoon to try
and make her a visit."
Now, to understand the charm of leisurely
and sympathetic intercourse, we should read the
letters of Madame de Sevigne ; to appreciate
the resources of ennui, we should read the nov-
els of Jane Austen. With Madame de Sesdgne
guests were not useful as an alleviation of bore-
dom ; they were valuable because they added
to the interest, the beauty and the zest of
GUESTS. 161
life. It never occurred to this charming
Frenchwoman, nor to her contemporaries,
that time could be better spent than in enter-
taining or being entertained by friends. Con-
versation was not then small coin, to be paid
our hastily like car-fare, merely in order to
get from one necessary topic to another. It
was the golden mean through which a generous
regard, a graceful courtesy, or a sparkling wit
lent beauty and distinction to every hour of
intercourse. A little group of friends in a
quiet countryside, with none of the robust di-
versions of English rural life. It has a sleepy
sound ; yet such was the pleasure-giving power
of hostess and of guest that this leisurely com-
panionship was fraught with fine delight, and
its fruits are our inheritance to-day, lingering
for us in the pages of those matchless letters
from which time can never steal the charm.
It is Miss Austen, however, who, with relent-
less candor, has shown us how usefully guests
may be employed as an antidote for the ennui
of intellectual vacuity. They are the chosen
relief for that direful dullness which country
gentlemen " like Sir John Middleton," expe-
rience from lack of occupation and ideas ; they
162 IN TEE DOZY HO UBS.
are the solace of sickly, uninteresting women
who desire some one to share with them the
monotonous current of existence. The Mid-
dletons, we are assured, " lived in a style of
equal hospitality and elegance. They were
scarcely ever without some friends staying
with them in the house, and they kept more
company of every kind than any other
family in the neighborhood." This indul-
gence, it appears, while equally welcome to
host and hostess, was more necessary to Sir
John's happiness than to his wife's ; for she
at least possessed one other source of continual
and unflagging diversion. " Sir John was a
sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother. He
hunted and shot, and she humored her chil-
dren ; and these were their only resources.
Lady Middleton, however, had the advantage
of being able to spoil her children all the year
round, while Sir John's independent employ-
ments were in existence only half the time."
Guests play an important part in Miss Aus-
ten's novels, as they did in Miss Austen's life,
and in the lives of all the hospitable country-
people of her time. Moreover, the visits her
heroines and their friends pay are not little tri-
GUESTS. 163
fling modern affairs of a few days or a week.
Distances counted for something when they had
to be traveled in a carriage or a post-chaise ;
and when people came to see their friends
in that fashion, they came to stay. Elizabeth
Bennet and Maria Lucas spend six weeks
with Charlotte Collins ; and Lady Catherine, it
will be remembered, does not at all approve of
their returning home so quickly. " I expected
you to stay two months," she says severely —
they are not her guests at all — "I told Mrs.
Collins so, before you came. There can be no
occasion for your going so soon." Eleanor
and Marianne Dashwood begin their visit to
Mrs. Jennings the first week of January, and
it is April before we find them setting forth
on their return. Anne Elliot goes to Upper-
cross for two months, though the only induce-
ment offered her is Mary Musgrove's pro-
phetic remark 'that she does not expect to
have a day's health all autumn ; and her only
pastime as a visitor appears to be the somewhat
dubious diversion of making herself generally
useful. It is a far cry from our busy age to
either Miss Austen or Madame de Sevigne.
The bounteous resources of a highly cultivated
164 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
leisure have never been very clearly under-
stood by the English-speaking race. The alle-
viations of inactivity and ennui are no longer
with us a rigorous necessity. Our vices and
our virtues conspire to defraud us of that
charming and sustained social intercourse
which is possible only when we have the un-
disturbed possession of our friends ; when we
are so happy as to be sheltered under the same
roof, to pursue the same occupations, to enjoy
the same pleasures, to exchange thoughts and
sentiments with entire freedom and familiarity.
" I cannot afford to speak much to my
friend," says Emerson, meaning that it is a
privilege he neither Values nor desires. We
cannot afford to speak much to our friends,
though we may desire it with our whole hearts,
because we have been foolish enough to per-
suade ourselves that we have other and better
things to do.
SYMPATHY.
" Sympathy," says Mr. Robert Louis Ste-
venson, is a thing to be encouraged, apart
from human considerations, because it sup-
plies us with materials for wisdom. It is pro-
bably more instructive to entertain a sneaking
kindness for any unpopular person than to
give way to perfect raptures of moral indig-
nation against his abstract vices."
These are brave words, and spoken in one
of those swift flashes of spiritual insight which
at first bewilder and then console us. We
have our share of sympathy ; hearty, healthy,
human sympathy for all that is strong and
successful ; but the force of moral indignation
— either our own or our neighbors' — has well-
nigh cowed us into silence. The fashion of the
day provides a procrustean standard for every
form of distinction ; and, if it does not fit, it
is lopped down to the necessary insignificance.
Those stern, efficient, one-sided men of action
who made history at the expense of their finer
166 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
natures ; those fiery enthusiasts who bore
down all just opposition to their designs ;
those loyal servants who saw no right nor
wrong save in the will of their sovereigns;
those keen-eyed statesmen who served their
countries with craft, and guile, and dissimula-
tion ; those light-hearted prodigals who flung
away their lives with a smile ; — are none of
these to yield us either edification or delight?
" Do great deeds, and they will sing them-
selves," says Emerson ; but it must be con-
fessed the songs are often of a very dismal
and enervating character. Columbus did a
great deed when he crossed the ocean and dis-
covered the fair, unknown land of promise ;
yet many of the songs in which we sing his
fame sound a good deal like paeans of re-
proach. The prevailing sentiment appears to
be that a person so manifestly ignorant and
improper should never have been permitted
to discover America at all.
This sickly tone is mirrored in much of the
depressing literature of our day. It finds
amplest expression in such joyless books as
" The Heavenly Twins," the heroine of which
remarks with commendable self-confidence
*- * c .
SYMPATHY. 167
that " The trade of governing is a eoarse pur-
suit ; " and also that " War is the dirty work
of a nation ; one of the indecencies of life."
She cannot even endure to hear it alluded to
when she is near; but, like Athene, whose
father, Zeus, " by chance spake of love mat-
ters in her presence," she flies chastely from
the very sound of such ill-doing. Now on first
reading this sensitive criticism, one is tempted
to a great shout of laughter, quite as coarse,
I fear, as the pursuit of governing, and almost
as indecent as war. Ah! founders of em«
pires, and masters of men, where are your
laurels now? If some people in public life
were acquainted with Mrs. Wititterly's real
opinion of them," says Mr. Wititterly to
Kate Nickleby, "they would not hold their
heads perhaps quite as high as they do." But
in moments of soberness Lh distorted points
of view seem rather more melancholy than di-
verting. Evadne is, after all, but the feeble
reflex of an over-anxious age which has lost
itself in a labyrinth of responsibilities. Shel-
ley, whose rigidity of mind was at times al-
most inconceivable, did not hesitate to deny
every attribute of greatness wherever be felt
168 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
no sympathy. To him, Constantino was a
"Christian reptile," a "stupid and wicked
monster ; " while of Napoleon he writes with
the invincible gravity of youth. "Buona-
parte's talents appear to me altogether con-
temptible and commonplace ; incapable as he
is of comparing connectedly the most obvious
propositions, or relishing any pleasure truly
enrapturing."
To the mundane and unpoetic mind it
would seem that there were several proposi-
tions, obvious or otherwise, which Napoleon
was capable of comparing quite connectedly,
and that his ruthless, luminous fashion of
dealing with such made him more terrible
than fate. As for pleasures, he knew how
to read and relish "Clarissa Harlowe," for
which evidence of sound literary taste, one
Englishman at least, Hazlitt, honored and
loved him greatly. If we are seeking an em-
bodiment of unrelieved excellence who will
work up well into moral anecdotes and jour-
nalistic platitudes, the emperor is plainly not
what we require. But when we have great
men under consideration, let us at least think
of their greatness. Let us permit our little
SYMPATHY. 169
hearts to expand, and our little eyes to sweep a
broad horizon. There is nothing in the world
I dislike so much as to be reminded of Na-
poleon's rudeness to Madame de Stael, or of
Caesar's vain attempt to hide his baldness.
Caesar was human; that is his charm; and
Madame de Stael would have sorely strained
the courtesy of good King Arthur. Had she
attached herself unflinchingly to his court, it
is probable he would have ended by request-
ing her to go elsewhere.
On the other hand, it is never worth while
to assert that genius repeals the decalogue.
We cannot believe with M. Waliszewski that
because Catherine of Russia was a great ruler
she was, even in the smallest degree, privi-
leged to be an immoral woman, to give " free
course to her senses imperially." The same
commandment binds with equal rigor both em-
press and costermonger. But it is the great-
ness of Catherine, and not her immorality,
which concerns us deeply. It is the greatness
of Marlborough, of Richelieu, and of Sir
Robert Walpole which we do well to consider,
and not their shortcomings, though from the
tone assumed too often by critics and histo-
170 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
rians, one would imagine that duplicity, am-
bition and cynicism were the only attributes
these men possessed ; that they stood for their
vices alone. One would imagine also that the
same sins were quite unfamiliar in humble
life, and had never been practised on a petty
scale by lawyers and journalists and bank
clerks. Yet vice, as Sir Thomas Browne re-
minds us, may be had at all prices. " Expen-
sive and costly iniquities which make the
noise cannot be every man's sins ; but the soul
may be foully inquinated at a very low rate,
and a man may be cheaply vicious to his own
perdition."
It is possible then to overdo moral criticism,
and to cheat ourselves out of both pleasure
and profit by narrowing our sympathies, and
by applying modern or national standards to
men of other ages and of another race. In-
stead of realizing, with Carlyle, that eminence
of any kind is a most wholesome thing to con-
template and to revere, we are perpetually
longing for some crucial test which will divide
true heroism — as we now regard it — from
those forceful qualities which the world has
hitherto been content to call heroic. I have
SYMPATHY. 171
heard people gravely discuss the possibility of
excluding from histories, from school histories
especially, the adjective "great," wherever it
is used to imply success unaccompanied by
moral excellence. Alfred the Great might
be permitted to retain his title. Like the
"blameless Ethiops," he is safely sheltered
from our too penetrating observation. But
Alexander, Frederick, Catherine, and Louis
should be handed down to future ages as the
" well-known." Alexander the Weil-Known !
We can all say that with clear consciences,
and without implying any sympathy or regard
for a person so manifestly irregular in his hab-
its, and seemingly so devoid of all altruistic
emotions. It is true that Mr. Addington Sy-
monds has traced a resemblance between the
Macedonian conqueror, and the ideal warrior
of the Grecian camp, Achilles the strong-
armed and terrible. Alexander, he maintains,
is Achilles in the flesh; passionate, uncon-
trolled, with an innate sense of what is great
and noble ; but " dragged in the mire of the
world and enthralled by the necessities of hu-
man life." The difference between them is
but the difference between the heroic concep-
172 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
tion of a poet and the stern limitations of
reality.
Apart, however, from the fact that Mr. Sy-
monds was not always what the undergradu-
ate lightly calls " up in ethics," it is to be
feared that Achilles himself meets with scant
favor in our benevolent age. " Homer mir-
rors the world's young manhood ; " but we
have grown old and exemplary, and shake our
heads over the lusty fierceness of the warrior,
and the facile repentance of Helen, and the
wicked wiles of Circe, which do not appear to
have met with the universal reprobation they
deserve. On the contrary, there is a blithe
good-temper in the poet's treatment of the en-
chantress, whose very name is so charming it
disarms all wrath. Circe ! The word is sweet
upon our lips ; and this light-hearted embodi-
ment of beauty and malice is not to be judged
from the bleak stand-point of Salem witch-
hunters. If we are content to take men and
women, in and out of books, with their edifi-
cation disguised, we may pass a great many
agreeable hours in their society, and find our-
selves unexpectedly benefited even by those
who appear least meritorious in our eyes. A
SYMPATHY. 173
frank and generous sympathy for any much
maligned and sorely slandered character, —
such, for instance, as Graham of Claverhouse ;
a candid recognition of his splendid virtues
and of his single vice ; a clear conception of
his temperament, his ability, and his work, —
these things are of more real service in broad-
ening our appreciations, and interpreting our
judgments, than are a score of unqualified
opinions taken ready-made from the most ad-
mirable historians in Christendom. It is a
liberal education to recognize, and to endeavor
to understand any form of eminence which the
records of mankind reveal.
As for the popular criticism which fastens
on a feature and calls it a man, nothing can
be easier or more delusive. Claverhouse was
merciless and densely intolerant ; but he was
also loyal, brave, and reverent ; temperate in
his habits, cleanly in his life, and one of the
first soldiers of his day. Surely this leaves
some little balance in his favor. Marlbor-
ough may have been as false as Judas and as
ambitious as Lucifer; but he was also the
greatest of English-speaking generals, and
England owes him something better than pic-
174 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
turesque invectives. What can we say to peo-
ple who talk to us anxiously about Byron's
unkindness to Leigh Hunt, and Dr. Johnson's
illiberal attitude towards Methodism, and
Scott's incomprehensible friendship for John
Ballantyne ; who remind us with austere dis-
satisfaction that Goldsmith did not pay his
debts, and that Lamb drank more than was
good for him, and that Dickens dressed loudly
and wore flashy jewelry ? I don't care what
Dickens wore. I would not care if he had
decorated himself with bangles, and anklets,
and earrings, and a nose-ring, provided he
wrote "Pickwick" and "David Copperfield."
If there be any living novelist who can give us
such another as Sam Weller, or Dick Swivel-
ler, or Mr. Micawber, or Mrs. Gamp, or Mrs.
Nickleby, let him festoon himself with gauds
from head to foot, and wedge his fingers
"knuckle-deep with rings," like the lady in
the old song, and then sit down and write.
The world will readily forgive him his em-
bellishments. It has forgiven Flaubert his
dressing-gown, and George Sand her eccentri-
cities of attire, and Goldsmith his coat of
Tyrian bloom, and the blue silk breeches for
SYMPATHY. 175
which he probably never paid his tailor. It
has forgiven Dr. Johnson* all his little sins ;
and Lamb the only sin for which he craves
forgiveness ; and Scott — but here we are not
privileged even to offer pardon. " It ill be-
comes either you or me to compare ourselves
with Scott," said Thackeray to a young writer
who excused himself for some literary laxity
by saying that " Sir Walter did the same."
" We should take off our hats whenever that
great and good man's name is mentioned in
our presence."
OPINIONS.
It has been occasionally remarked by peo-
ple who are not wholly in sympathy with the
methods and devices of our time that this is
an age of keen intellectual curiosity. We
have scant leisure and scant liking for hard
study, and we no longer recognize the admi-
rable qualities of a wise and contented igno-
rance. Accordingly, there has been invented
for us in late years, a via media,) a something
which is neither light nor darkness, a short
cut to that goal which we used to be assured
had no royal road for languid feet to follow.
The apparent object of the new system is to
enable us to live like gentlemen, or like gentle-
women, on other people's ideas; to spare us
the labor and exhaustion incidental to forming
opinions of our own by giving us the free use
of other people's opinions. There is a charm-
ing simplicity in the scheme, involving as it
does no effort of thought or mental adjust-
ment, which cannot fail to heartily recom-
OPINIONS. Ill
mend it to the general public, while the addi-
tional merit of cheapness endears it to its
thrifty upholders. We are all accustomed to
talk vaguely about " questions of burning inter-
est," and " the absorbing problems of the day."
Some of us even go so far as to have a toler-
ably clear notion of what these questions and
problems are. It is but natural, then, that
we should take a lively pleasure, not in the
topics themselves, about which we care very
little, but in the persuasions and convictions
of our neighbors, about which we have learned
to care a great deal. Discussions rage on
every side of us, and the easy, offhand, cock-
sure verdicts which are so frankly confided to
the world have become a recognized source of
popular education and enlightenment.
I have sometimes thought that this feverish
exchange of opinions received a fatal impetus
from that curious epidemic rife in England a
few years ago, and known as the " Lists of a
Hundred Books." Never before had such an
admirable opportunity been offered to people
to put on what are commonly called " frills,"
and it must be confessed they made the most
of it. The Koran, the Analects of Confucius,
178 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Spinoza, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Xenophon,
Lewis's History of Philosophy, the Saga of
Burnt Njal, Locke's Conduct of the Under-
standing, — such, and such only, were the
works unflinchingly urged upon us by men
whom we had considered, perhaps, as human
as ourselves, whom we might almost have sus-
pected of solacing their lighter moments with
an occasional study of Rider Haggard or Ga-
boriau. If readers could be made by the sim-
ple process of deluging the world with good
counsel, these arbitrary lists would have
marked a new intellectual era. As it was,
they merely excited a lively but unfruitful
curiosity. "Living movements," Cardinal
Newman reminds us, " do not come of commit-
tees." I knew, indeed, one impetuous student
who rashly purchased the Grammar of Assent
because she saw it in a list ; but there was a
limit even to her ardor, for eighteen months
afterwards the leaves were still uncut. It is
a striking proof of Mr. Arnold's inspired
rationality that, while so many of his country-
men were instructing us in this peremptory
fashion, he alone, who might have spoken
with authority, declined to add his name and
OPINIONS. 179
list to the rest. It was an amusing game, he
said, but he felt no disposition to play it.
Some variations of this once popular pastime
have lingered even to our day. Lists of the
best American authors, lists of the best foreign
authors, lists of the best ten books published
within a decade, have appeared occasionally
in our journals, while a list of books which
prominent people intended or hoped to read
" in the near future " filled us with respect for
such heroic anticipations. Ten- volume works
of the severest character counted as trifles in
these prospective studies. For the past year,
it is true, the World's Fair has given a less
scholastic tone to newspaper discussions. We
hear comparatively little about the Analects
of Confucius, and a great deal about the
White City, and the Department of Anthro-
pology. Perhaps it is better to tell the pub-
lic your impressions of the Fair than to con-
fide to it your favorite authors. One revela-
tion is as valuable as the other, but it is pos-
sible, with caution, to talk about Chicago in
terms that will give general satisfaction. It
is not possible to express literary, artistic, or
national preferences without exposing one's
180 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
self to vigorous reproaches from people who
hold different views. I was once lured by a
New York periodical into a number of harm-
less confidences, unlikely, it seemed to me, to
awaken either interest or indignation. The
questions asked were of the mildly searching
order, like those which delighted the hearts of
children, when I was a very little girl, in our
"Mental Photograph Albums." "Who is
your favorite character in fiction ? " " Who
is your favorite character in history?"
44 What do you consider the finest attribute of
man ? " Having amiably responded to a por-
tion of these inquiries, I was surprised and
flattered, some weeks later, at seeing myself
described in a daily paper — on the strength,
too, of my own confessions — as irrational,
morbid, and cruel; excusable only on the
score of melancholy surroundings and a sickly
constitution. And the delightful part of it
was that I had apparently revealed all this
myself. " Do not contend in words about
things of no consequence," counsels St. Teresa,
who carried with her to the cloister wisdom
enough to have kept all of us poor worldlings
out of trouble.
OPINIONS. 181
The system by which opinions of little or no
value are assiduously collected and generously
distributed is far too complete to be baffled by
inexperience or indifference. The enterpris-
ing dditor or journalist who puts the question
is very much like Sir Charles Napier; he
wants an answer of some kind, however inca-
pable we may be of giving it. A list of the
queries propounded to me in the last year or
so recalls painfully my own comprehensive ig-
norance. These are a few which I remember.
What was my opinion of college training as
a preparation for literary work ? What was
my opinion of Greek comedy ? Was I a pes-
simist or an optimist, and why ? What were
my favorite flowers, and did I cultivate them ?
What books did I think young children ought
not to read? At what age and under what
impulses did I consider children first began
to swear? What especial and serious studies
would I propose for married women ? What
did I consider most necessary for the all-
around development of the coming young
man ? It appeared useless to urge in reply to
these questions that I had never been to col-
lege, never read a line of Greek, never been
182 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
married, never taken charge of children, and
knew nothing whatever about developing young
men. I found that my ignorance on all these
points was assumed from the beginning, but
that this fact only made my opinions more in-
teresting and piquant to people as ignorant as
myself. Neither did it ever occur to my cor-
respondents that if I had known anything
about Greek comedy or college training, I
should have endeavored to turn my knowledge
into money by writing articles of my own, and
should never have been so lavish as to give my
information away.
That these public discussions or symposiums
are, however, an occasional comfort to their
participants was proven by the alacrity with
which a number of writers came forward, some
years ago, to explain to the world why Eng-
lish fiction was not a finer and stronger ar-
ticle. Innocent and short-sighted readers,
wedded to the obvious, had foolishly supposed
that modern novels were rather forlorn be-
cause the novelists were not able to write bet-
ter ones. It therefore became the manifest
duty of the novelists to notify us clearly that
they were able to write very much better ones,
OPINIONS. 183
but that the public would not permit them to
do it. Like Dr. Holmes, they did not ven-
ture to be as funny as they could. " Thought-
ful readers of mature age," we were told, " are
perishing for accuracy." This accuracy they
were, one and all, prepared to furnish without
stint, but were prohibited lest " the clash of
broken commandments " should be displeasing
to polite female ears. A great deal of angry
sentiment was exchanged on this occasion, and
a great many original and valuable sugges-
tions were offered by way of relief. It was an
admirable opportunity for any one who had
written a story to confide to the world " the
theory of his art," to make self-congratulatory
remarks upon his own "standpoint," and to
deprecate the stupid propriety of the public.
When the echoes of thesQ passionate protesta-
tions had died into silence, we took comfort in
thinking that Hawthorne had not delayed to
write " The Scarlet Letter " from a sensitive
regard for his neighbors' opinions ; and that
two great nations, unvexed by " the clash of
broken commandments," had received the
book as a heritage of infinite beauty and de-
light. Art needs no apologist, and our great
184 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
literary artist, using his chosen material after
his chosen fashion, heedless alike of new the-
ories and of ancient prejudices, gave to the
world a masterpiece of fiction which the world
was not too stupid to hold dear.
The pleasure of imparting opinions in print
is by no means confined to professionals, to
people who are assumed to know something
about a subject because they have been more
or less occupied with it for years. On the
contrary, the most lively and spirited discus-
sions are those to which the general public
lends a willing hand. Almost any topic will
serve to arouse the argumentative zeal of the
average reader, who rushes to the fray with
that joyous alacrity which is so exhilarating to
the peaceful looker-on. The disputed pronun-
ciation or spelling of a word, if ventilated with
spirit in a literary journal, will call forth
dozens of letters, all written in the most seri-
ous and urgent manner, and all apparently
emanating from people of rigorous views and
limitless leisure. If a letter here or there —
a i/, perhaps, or an I — can only be elevated
to the dignity of a national issue, then the
combatants don their coats of mail, unfurl their
OPINIONS. 185
countries' flags, and wrangle merrily and oft
to the sounds of martial music. If, on the
other hand, the subject of contention be a
somewhat obvious statement, as, for example,
that the work of women in art, science, and
literature is inferior to the work of men, it is
amazing and gratifying to see the number of
disputants who promptly prepare to deny the
undeniable, and lead a forlorn hope to failure.
The impassive reader who first encounters a
remark of this order is apt to ask himself if
it be worth while to state so explicitly what
everybody already knows; and behold! a
week has not passed over his head before a
dozen angry protestations are hurled into
print. These meet with sarcastic rejoinders.
The editor of the journal, who is naturally
pleased to secure copy on such easy terms,
adroitly stirs up slumbering sentiment ; and
time, temper, and ink are wasted without stint
by people who are the only, converts of their
own eloquence. " Embrace not the blind side
of opinions," says Sir Thomas Browne, who,
born in a contentious age, with " no genius to
disputes," preached mellifluously of the joys
of toleration, and of the discomforts of inordi-
nate zeaL
186 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
Not very long ago, I was asked by a
sprightly little paper to please say in its col-
umns whether I thought new books or old
books better worth the reading. It was the .
kind of question which an ordinary lifetime
spent in hard study would barely enable one
to answer ; but I found, on examining some
back numbers of the journal, that it had been
answered a great many times already, and ap-
parently without the smallest hesitation. Cor-
respondents had come forward to overturn our
ancient idols, with no sense of insecurity or
misgiving. One breezy reformer from Ne-
braska sturdily maintained that Mrs. Hodgson
Burnett wrote much better stories than did Jane
Austen ; while another intrepid person, a Vir-
ginian, pronounced "The Vicar of Wake-
field" "dull and namby - pamby," declaring
that "one half the reading world would
agree with him if they dared." Perhaps they
would, — who knows ? — but it is a privilege
of that half of the reading world to be silent
on the subject. Simple preference is a good
and sufficient motive in determining one's
choice of books, but it does not warrant a reader
in conferring his impressions upon the world
opinions. 187 v
Even the involuntary humor of such disclos-
ures cannot win them forgiveness ; for the ten-
dency to permit the individual spirit to run
amuck through criticism is resulting in a lower
standard of correctness. " The true value of
souls," says Mr. Pater, "is in proportion to
what they can admire ; " and the popular no-
tion that everything is a matter of opinion,
and that one opinion is pretty nearly as good
as another, is immeasurably hurtful to that
higher law by which we seek to rise steadily
to an appreciation of whatever is best in the
world. Nor can we acquit our modern critics
of fostering this self-assertive ignorance, when
they so lightly ignore those indestructible
standards by which alone we are able to meas-
ure the difference between big and little
things. It seems a clever and a daring feat
to set up models of our own ; but it is in real-
ity much easier than toiling after the old un-
approachable models of our forefathers. The
originality which dispenses so blithely with
the past is powerless to give us a correct esti-
mate of anything that we enjoy in the present.
It is but a short step from the offhand opin-
ions of scientific or literary men to the offhand
188 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
opinions of the crowd. When the novelists
had finished telling us, in the newspapers and
magazines, what they thought about one an-
other, and especially what they thought about
themselves, it then became the turn of novel-
readers to tell us what they thought about
fiction. This sudden invasion of the Vandals
left to the novelists but one resource, but one
undisputed privilege. They could permit us
to know and they have permitted us to know
just how they came to write their books ; in
what moments of inspiration, under what be-
nign influences, they gave to the world those
priceless pages.
" Sing, God of Love, and tell me in what dearth
Thrice-gifted Snevellicci came on earth ! "
After which, unless the unsilenced public
comes forward to say just how and when and
where they read the volumes, they must ac-
knowledge themselves routed from the field.
La vie de parade has reached its utmost
license when a Prime Minister of England
is asked to tell the world — after the manner
of old Father William — how he has kept so
hale ; when the Prince of Wales is requested
to furnish a list of readable books ; when an
OPINIONS. 189
eminent clergyman is bidden to reveal to U8
why he has never been ill ; when the wife of
the President of the United States is ques-
tioned as to how she eooks her Thanksgiving
dinner ; when married women in private life
draw aside the domestic veil to tell us how
they have brought up their daughters, and un-
married women betray to us the secret of
their social success. Add to these sources of
information the opinions of poets upon educa-
tion, and of educators upon poetry ; of church-
men upon politics, and of politicians upon the
church ; of journalists upon art, and of artists
upon journalism ; and we must in all sincerity
acknowledge that this is an enlightened age.
44 The voice of the great multitude," to quote
from a popular agitator, " rings in our startled
ears;" and its eloquence is many-sided and
discursive. Albertus Magnus, it is said, once
made a head which talked. That was an ex-
ceedingly clever thing for him to do. But
the head was so delighted with its accomplish-
ment that it talked all the time. Whereupon,
tradition holds, St. Thomas Aquinas grew im-
patient, and broke it into pieces. St. Thomas
was a scholar, a philosopher, and a saint.
THE CHILDREN'S AGE.
If adults are disposed to doubt their own
decreasing significance, and the increasing as-
cendency of children, they may learn a lesson
in humility from the popular literature of the
day, as well as from social and domestic life.
The older novelists were so little impressed by
the ethical or artistic consequence of childhood
that they gave it scant notice in their pages.
Scott, save for a few passages here and there,
as in "The Abbot" and "Peveril of the
Peak," ignores it altogether. Miss Austen is
reticent on the subject, and, when she does
speak, manifests a painful lack of enthusiasm.
Mary Musgrave's troublesome little boys and
Lady Middleton's troublesome little girl seem
to be introduced for no other purpose than to
show how tiresome and exasperating they can
be. Fanny Price's pathetic childhood is hur-
ried over as swiftly as possible, and her infant
emotions furnish no food for speculation or
analysis. Saddest of all, Margaret Dashwood
THE CHILDREN'S AGE. 191
is ignored as completely as if she had not
reached the interesting age of thirteen. " A
good-humored, well-disposed girl," this is all
the description vouchsafed her ; after which, in
the absence of further information, we forget
her existence entirely, until we are reminded
in the last chapter that she has " reached an
age highly suitable for dancing, and not
very ineligible for being supposed to have a
lover." In other words, she is now ready for
treatment at the novelist's hands ; only, un-
happily, the story is told, the final page has
been turned, and her chances are over forever.
I well remember my disappointment, as a
child, at being able to find so little about
children in the old-fashioned novels on our
bookshelves. Trollope was particularly try-
ing, because there were illustrations which
seemed to promise what I wanted, and which
were wholly illusive in their character. Posy
and her grandfather playing cat's-cradle,
Edith Grantly sitting on old Mr. Harding's
knee, poor little Louey Trevelyan furtively
watching his unhappy parents, — I used to
read all around these pictures in the hope of
learning more about the children so portrayed.
192 IN THE DOZY HOURS,
But they never said or did anything to awaken
my interest, or played any but purely passive
parts in the long histories of their grown-up
relatives. I had so few books of my own that
I was compelled to forage for entertainment
"wherever I could find it, dipping experiment-
ally into the most unpromising sources, and re-
tiring discomfited from the search. u Vivian
Grey " I began several times with enthusiasm.
The exploits of the hero at school amazed
and thrilled me — as well they might; but I
never comprehensively grasped his social and
political career. Little Rawdon Crawley and
that small, insufferable George Osborne, were
chance acquaintances, introduced through the
medium of the illustrations ; but my real
friends were the Tullivers and David Copper-
field, before he went to that stupid school of
Dr. Strong's at Canterbury, and lost all sem-
blance of his old childish self. It was not
possible to grow deeply attached to Oliver
Twist. He was a lifeless sort of boy, despite
the author's assurances to the contrary ; and,
though the most wonderful things were al-
ways happening to him, it never seemed to me
that he lived up to his interesting surround-
THE CHILDREN'S AGE. 193
ings. He would have done very well for a
quiet life, but was sadly unsuited to that lively
atmosphere of burglary and housebreaking.
" Aladdin," says Mr. Froude, " remained a
poor creature, for all his genii." As for Nell,
I doubt if it would ever occur to a small inno-
cent reader to think of her as a child at all.
I was far from critical in those early days, and
much disposed to agree with Lamb's amiable
friend that all books must necessarily be good
books. Nell was, in my eyes, a miracle of
courage and capacity, a creature to be believed
in implicitly, to be revered and pitied ; but she
was not a little girl. I was a little girl myself,
and I knew the difference.
It was Dickens who first gave children their
prestige in fiction. Jeffrey, we are assured,
shed tears over Nell ; and Bret Harte, whose
own pathos is so profoundly touching, de-
scribes for us the rude and haggard miners fol-
lowing her fortunes with breathless sympathy :
'* While the whole camp with * Nell ' on English meadows,
Wandered and lost their way."
At present we are spared the heartrending
childish deathbeds which Dickens made so
painfully popular, because dying in novels
194 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
has rather gone out of style. The young
people live, and thrive, and wax scornful,
and fill up chapter after chapter, to the ex-
clusion of meritorious adults. What a con-
trast between the incidental, almost furtive
manner in which Henry Kingsley introduces
his delightful children into " Ravenshoe," and
the profound assurance with which Sarah
Grand devotes seventy pages to a minute
description of the pranks of the Heavenly
Twins. Readers of the earlier novel used
to feel they would like to know a little —
just a little more of Gus, and Flora, and
Archy, and the patient nursery cat who was
quite accustomed to being held upside down,
and who went out " a-walking on the leads,"
when she was needed to accompany her young
master to bed. Readers of " The Heavenly
Twins " begin by being amused, then grow
aghast, and conclude by wondering why the
wretched relatives of those irrepressible chil-
dren were not driven to some such expedient
as that proposed by a choleric old gentleman
of my acquaintance to the doting mother of an
only son. " Put him in a hogshead, madam,
and let him breathe through the bunghole ! "
THE CHILDREN'S AGE. 195
Two vastly different types of infant preco-
city have been recently given to the world by
Mrs. Deland and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, the
only point of resemblance between their re-
spective authors being the conviction Which
they share in common that children are prob-
lems which cannot be too minutely studied,
and that we cannot devote too much time or
attention to their scrutiny. Mrs. Deland,
with less humor and a firmer touch, draws for
us in " The Story of a Child," a sensitive,
highly strung, morbid and imaginative little
girl, who seems born to give the lie to Scho-
penhauer's comfortable verdict, that "the
keenest sorrows and the keenest joys are not for
women to feel." Ellen Dale suffers as only a
self-centred nature can. She thinks about her
self so much that her poor little head is turned
with fancied shortcomings and imaginary
wrongs. Most children have these sombre
moods now and again. They don't overcome
them ; they forget them, which is a better and
healthier thing to do. But Ellen's humors
are analyzed with a good deal of seriousness
and sympathy. When she is not " agonized "
over her tiny faults, she is " tasting sin with
196 IN THE DOZY H0UR8.
the subtle epicurean delight of the artistic
temperament ; " a passage which may be aptly
compared with George Eliot's tamer descrip-
tion of Lucy Deane trotting by her cousin
Tom's side, " timidly enjoying the rare treat
of doing something naughty." The sensations
are practically the same, the methods of delin-
eating them different.
Mrs. Burnett, on the other hand, while in-
dulging us unstintedly in reminiscences of
her own childhood, is disposed to paint the
picture in cheerful, not to say roseate colors.
" The One I Knew the Best of All " was evi-
dently a very good, and clever, and pretty, and
well-dressed little girl, who played her part
with amiability and decorum in all the small
vicissitudes common to infant years. No
other children being permitted to enter the
narrative, except as lay figures, our atten-
tion is never diverted from the small crea-
ture with the curls, who studies her geogra-
phy, and eats her pudding, and walks in
the Square, and dances occasionally at par-
ties, and behaves herself invariably as a nice
little girl should. It is reassuring, after
reading the youthful recollections of Sir
THE CHILDREN'S AGE. 197
Richard Burton, with their irreverent and ap-
palling candor, to be gently consoled by Mrs.
Burnett, and to know with certainty that she
really was such a delightful and charming
child.
For Sir Richard, following the fashion of
the day, has left us a spirited record of his
early years, and they furnish scant food for
edification. There was a time when unfledged
vices, like unfledged virtues, were ignored by
the biographer, and forgotten even by the more
conscientious writer, who compiled his own
memoirs. Scott's account of his boyhood is
graphic, but all too brief. Boswell, the dif-
fuse, speeds over Johnson's tender youth with
some not very commendatory remarks about
his "dismal inertness of disposition." Gib-
bon, indeed, awakens our expectations with
this solemn and stately sentence : —
" My lot might have been that of a slave, a
savage, or a peasant ; nor can I reflect with-
out pleasure on the bounty of nature which
cast my birth in a free and civilized country,
in an age of science and philosophy, in a fam-
ily of honorable rank, and decently endowed
with the gifts of fortune."
198 jy THE DOZY HOURS.
After which majestic preamble, we are sur-
prised to see how little interest he takes in his
own sickly and studious childhood, and how
disinclined he is to say complimentary things
about his own precocity. He writes without
enthusiasm : —
" For myself I must be content with a very
small share of the civil and literary fruits of
a public school."
Burton, unhappily, had no share at all, and
the loss of training and discipline told heavily
on him all his life. His lawless and wandering
childhood, so full of incident and so destitute
of charm, is described with uncompromising
veracity in Lady Burton's portly volumes.
He was as far removed from the virtues of
Lord Fauntleroy as from the brilliant and
elaborate naughtiness of the Heavenly Twins ;
but he has the advantage over all these little
people in being so convincingly real. He
fought until he was beaten " as thin as a shot-
ten herring." He knocked down his nurse —
with the help of his brother and sister — and
jumped on her. He hid behind the curtains
and jeered at his grandmother's French. He
was not pretty, and he was not picturesque.
THE CHILDREN'S AGE. 199
" A piece of yellow nankin would be bought
to dress the whole family, like three sticks of
barley sugar."
He was not amiable, and he was not polite,
and he was not a safe child on whom to try
experiments of the " Harry and Lucy " order,
as the following anecdote proves :
" By way of a wholesome and moral lesson
of self-command and self-denial, our mother
took us past Madame Fisterre's (the pastry
cook's) windows, and bade us look at all the
good things ; whereupon we fixed our ardent
affections on a tray of apple puffs. Then she
said : ' Now, my d$ars, let us go away ; it is
so good for little children to restrain them-
selves.' Upon this we three devilets turned
flashing eyes and burning cheeks on our mor-
alizing mother, broke the window with our
fists, clawed out the tray of apple puffs, and
bolted, leaving poor Mother a sadder and a
wiser woman, to pay the damages of her law-
less brood's proceedings."
It is the children's age when such a story
— and many more like it — are gleefully nar-
rated and are gladly read. Yet if we must
exchange the old-time reticence for unreserved
200 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
disclosures, if we must hear all about an au-
thor's infancy from his teething to his first
breeches, and from his A B C's to his Greek
and Latin, it is better to have him presented
to us with such unqualified veracity. He is
not attractive when seen in this strong light,
but he is very much alive.
A FORGOTTEN POET.
There has been a vast deal of moralizing
on the brevity of fame ever since that far-away
day when mankind became sufficiently so-
phisticated to covet posthumous distinction.
Yet, in reality, it is not so surprising that peo-
ple should be forgotten as that they should
be remembered, and remembered often for the
sake of one swift, brave deed that cost no
effort, or of a few lovely words thrown to the
world in a moment of unconscious inspiration,
when the writer little dreamed he was forging
a chain strong enough to link him with the
future. Occasionally, too, a species of immor-
tality is conferred upon respectable mediocrity
by the affection or the abhorrence it excites.
The men whom Pope rhymed about because
he hated them, the men to whom Lamb wrote
so delightfully because he loved them, all live
for us in the indestructible land of letters.
It would be a hard matter to reckon up the
sum of indebtedness which is thus innocently
202 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
incurred by those who have no coin of their
own for payment.
Not long ago a writer of distinction was
idling his way pleasantly through a volume of
Mrs. Browning's poetry, when his attention
was arrested by a quotation which stood at
the head of that rather nebulous effusion,
"A Rhapsody of Life's Progress." It was
but a single line,
n
Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath,"
and it was accredited to Cornelius Mathews,
author of " Poems on Man." A foot-note, —
people were more generous in the matter of
foot-notes forty years ago than now — gave
the additional and somewhat startling infor-
mation that " Poems on Man " was " a small
volume by an American poet, as remarkable
in thought and manner for a vital sinewy vig-
our as the right arm of Pathfinder." This
was stout praise. "The right arm of Path-
finder." We all know what sinewy vigor was
there; but of Cornelius Mathews, it would
seem, no man knew anything at all. Yet his
poems had traveled far when they lay in Mrs.
Browning's path, and of her admiration for
A FORGOTTEN POET. 203
them she had left us this unstinted proof.
Moreover the one line,
" Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath "
had in it enough of character and sweetness
to provoke an intelligent curiosity. As a
scholar and a man of letters, the reader felt
his interest awakened. He replaced Mrs.
Browning on the book shelf, and made up his
mind with characteristic distinctness he would
read the poems of this forgotten American
author.
It was not an easy resolution to keep. A
confident appeal to the public libraries of New
York and Philadelphia brought to light the
astonishing fact that no copy of the "Poems
on Man " was to be found within their walls.
The work had been published in several edi-
tions by Harper and Brothers between the
years 1838 and 1843 ; but no forlorn and dust
covered volume still lingered on their shelves.
The firm, when interrogated, knew no more
about Cornelius Mathews than did the rest of
the reading world. The next step was to ad-
vertise for a second-hand copy ; but for a long
while it seemed as though even second-hand
204 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
copies had disappeared from the face of the
continent. The book was so exceedingly rare
that it must have been a universal favorite for
the lighting of household fires. In the end,
however, persevering effort was crowned with
its inevitable success. " The works of Cor-
nelius Mathews " were unearthed from some
dim corner of obscurity, and suffered to see
the genial light of day.
They comprise a great deal of prose and a
very little verse, all bound up together, after
the thrifty fashion of our fathers, in one portly
volume, with dull crimson sides, and double
columns of distressingly fine print. The
" Poems on Man " are but nineteen in number,
and were originally published in a separate
pamphlet. They are arranged systematically,
and are designed to do honor to American
citizenship under its most sober and common-
place aspect. The author is in no way dis-
couraged by the grayness of his atmosphere,
nor by the ucheroic material with which he
has to deal. On the contrary, he is at home
with farmers, and mechanics, and merchants ;
and ill at ease with painters and soldiers, to
whom it must be confessed he preaches a little
A FORGOTTEN POET. 205
too palpably. It is painful to consider what
bad advice he gives to the sculptor in this one
vicious line,
" Think not too much what other climes have done."
Yet, in truth, he is neither blind to the past,
nor unduly elated with the present. He feels
the splendid possibilities of a young nation
with all its life before it ; and earnestly, and
with dignity, he pleads for the development of
character, and for a higher system of morality.
If his verse be uneven and mechanical, and the
sinewy vigor of Pathfinder be not so apparent
as might have been reasonably expected, I can
still understand how these simple and manly
sentiments should have awakened the enthu-
siasm of Mrs. Browning, who was herself no
student of form, and who sincerely believed
that poetry was a serious pursuit designed for
the improvement of mankind.
In his narrower fashion, Mr. Cornelius Ma-
thews shared this pious creed, and strove,
within the limits of his meagre art, to awaken
in the hearts of his countrymen a patriotism
sober and sincere. He calls on the journalist
to tell the truth, on the artisan to respect the
206 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
interests of his employer, on the merchant to
cherish an old-time honor and honesty, on the
politician to efface himself for the good of his
constituency.
" Accursed -who on the Mount of Rulers sits,
Nor gains some glimpses of a fairer day ;
Who knows not there, what there his soul befits, —
Thoughts that leap up and kindle far away
The coming time ! Who rather dulls the ear
With brawling discord and a cloud of words ;
Owning no hopeful object, far or near,
Save what the universal self affords."
This is not heroic verse, but it shows an heroic
temper. The writer has evidently some know-
ledge of things as they are* and some faith in
things as they ought to be, and these twin
sources of grace save him from bombast and
from cynicism. Never in all the earnest and
appealing lines does he indulge himself or his
readers in that exultant self-glorification which
is so gratifying and so inexpensive. His pa-
triotism is not of the shouting and hat-flour-
ishing order, but has its roots in an anxious
and loving regard for the welfare of his father-
land. Occasionally he strikes a poetic note,
and has moments of brief but genuine inspira-
tion.
A FORGOTTEN POET. 207
" The elder forms, the antique mighty faces,"
which lend their calm and shadowy presence
to the farmer's toil, bring with them swift
glimpses of a strong pastoral world. Not a
blithe world by any means. No Pan pipes in
the rushes. No shaggy herdsmen sing in rude
mirthful harmony. No sun-burnt girls laugh
in the harvest-field. Rusticity has lost its na-
tive grace, and the cares of earth sit at the
fireside of the husbandman. Yet to him be-
long moments of deep content, and to his clean
and arduous life are given pleasures which the
artisan has never known.
" Better to watch the live-long day
The clouds that come and go,
Wearying the heaven they idle through,
And fretting out its everlasting blue.
Though sadness on the woods may often lie,
And wither to a waste the meadowy land,
Pure blows the air, and purer shines the sky,
For nearer always to Heaven's gate you stand."
The most curious characteristic of Mr. Ma-
thew's work is the easy and absolute fashion in
which it ignores the influence, and indeed the
very existence of woman. The word " man "
must here be taken in its literal significance.
It is not of the human race that the author
208 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
sings, but of one half of it alone. No trouble-
some flutter of petticoats disturbs his serene
meditations ; no echo of passion haunts his
placid verse. Even in his opening stanzas
on " The Child," there is no allusion to any
mother. The infant appears to have come
into life after the fashion of Pallas Athene,
and upon the father only depends its future
weal or woe. The teacher apparently confines
his labors to little boys; the preacher has
a congregation of men ; the reformer, the
scholar, the citizen, the friend, all dwell in
a cool masculine world, where the seductive
voice of womankind never insinuates itself to
the endangering of sober and sensible beha-
vior. This enforced absence of " The Eternal
Feminine " is more striking when we approach
the realms of art. Does the painter desire
subjects for his brush ?
" The mountain and the sea, the setting sun,
The storm, the face of men, and the calm moon,"
are considered amply sufficient for his needs.
Does the sculptor ask for models ? They are
presented him in generous abundance.
" Crowned heroes of the early age,
Chieftain and soldier, senator and sage ;
A FORGOTTEN POET. 209
The tawny ancient of the warrior race,
With dusky limb and kindling face."
Or, should he prefer less conventional types —
" Colossal and resigned, the gloomy gods
Eying at large their lost abodes,
Towering and swart, and knit in every limb ;
With brows on which the tempest lives,
With eyes wherein the past survives,
Gloomy, and battailous, and grim."
With all these legitimate subjects at his com-
mand, why indeed should the artist turn aside
after that beguiling beauty which Eve saw
reflected in the clear waters of Paradise, and
which she loved with unconscious vanity or
ever Adam met her amorous gaze. Only to
the poet is permitted the smallest glimpse into
the feminine world. In one brief half-line,
Mr. Mathews coldly and chastely allows that
44 young Love " may whisper something — we
are not told what — which is best fitted for
the poetic ear.
What an old-fashioned bundle of verse it is,
though written a bare half century ago I How
far removed fron the delicate conceits, the
inarticulate sadness of our modern versifiers ;
from the rondeaux, and ballades, and pastels,
210 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
and impressions, and nocturnes, with which
we have grown bewilderingly familiar. How
these titles alone would have puzzled the sober
citizen who wrote the " Poems on Man," and
who endeavored with rigid honesty to make
his meaning as clear as English words would
permit. There is no more chance to speculate
over these stanzas than there is to speculate
over Hogarth's pictures. What is meant is
told, not vividly, but with steadfast purpose,
and with an innocent hope that it may be of
some service to the world. The world, indeed,
has forgotten the message, and forgotten the
messenger as well. Only in a brief foot-note
of Mrs. Browning's there lingers still the faint
echo of what once was life. For such modest
merit there is no second sunrise; and yet a
quiet reader may find an hour well spent in
the staid company of these serious verses,
whose best eloquence is their sincerity.
DIALOGUES.
Dialogues have come back into fashion
and favor. Editors of magazines look on
them kindly, and readers of magazines accept
them as philosophically as they accept any
other form of instruction or entertainment
which is provided in their monthly bills of
fare. Perhaps Mr. Oscar Wilde is in some
measure responsible for the revival ; perhaps
it may be traced more directly to the serious
and stimulating author of " Baldwin," whose
discussions are sufficiently subtle and relent-
less to gratify the keenest discontent. The
restless reader who embarks on Vernon Lee's
portly volume of conversations half wishes he
knew people who could discourse in that
fashion, and is half grateful that he does n't.
To converse for hours on " Doubts and Pes-
simism," or " The Value of the . Ideal," is no
trivial test of endurance, especially when one
person does three-fourths of the talking. "We
hardly know which to admire most : Baldwin,
212 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
who elucidates a text — and that text, evolu-
tion — for six pages at a breath, or Michael,
who listens and " smiles." Even the occa-
sional intermissions, when " Baldwin shook
his head," or " they took a turn in silence," or
" Carlo's voice trembled," or " Dorothy pointed
to the moors," do little to relieve the general
tension. It is no more possible to support
conversation on this high and serious level
than it is possible to nourish it on Mr. Wilde's
brilliant and merciless epigrams. Those
sparkling dialogues in which Cyril might be
Vivian, and Vivian, Cyril ; or Gilbert might
be Ernest, and Ernest, Gilbert, because all
alike are Mr. Wilde, and speak with his voice
alone, dazzle us only to betray. They are ad-
mirable pieces of literary workmanship ; they
are more charming and witty than any con-
temporaneous essays. But if we will place by
their side those few and simple pages in which
Landor permits Montaigne and Joseph Scali-
ger to gossip together for a brief half hour at
breakfast time, we will better understand the
value of an element which Mr. Wilde excludes
— humanity, with all its priceless sympathies
and foibles.
DIALOGUES, 213
Nevertheless, it is not Landor's influence,
by any means, which is felt in the random
dialogues of to-day. He is an author more
praised than loved, more talked about than
read, and his unapproachable delicacy and
distinction are far removed from all efforts of
facile imitation. Our modern " imaginary
conversations," whether openly satiric, or
gravely instructive, are fashioned on other
models. They have a faint flavor of Lucian,
a subdued and decent reflection of the " Noc-
tes ; " but they never approach the classic in-
cisiveness and simplicity of Landor. There
is a delightfully witty dialogue of Mr. Bar-
rie's called " Brought Back from Elysium,"
in which the ghosts of Scott, Fielding, Smol-
lett, Dickens, and Thackeray are interviewed
by five living novelists, who kindly undertake
to point out to them the superiority of modern
fiction. In this admirable little satire, every
stroke tells, every phantom and every novelist
speaks in character, and the author, with dex-
terous art, fits his shafts of ridicule into the
easy play of a possible conversation. Nothing
can be finer than the way in which Scott's
native modesty, of which not even Elysium
214 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
and the Grove of Bay-trees have robbed him,
struggles with his humorous perception of the
situation. Fielding is disposed to be angry,
Thackeray severe, and Dickens infinitely
amused. But Sir Walter, dragged against
his will into this unloved and alien atmosphere,
is anxious only to give every man his due.
" How busy you must have been, since my
day," he observes with wistful politeness,
when informed that the stories have all been
told, and that intellectual men and women no
longer care to prance with him after a band
of archers, or follow the rude and barbarous
fortunes of a tournament.
For such brief bits of satire the dialogue
affords an admirable medium, if it can be
handled with ease and force. For imparting
opinions upon abstract subjects it is sure to
be welcomed by coward souls who think that
information broken up into little bits is some-
what easier of digestion. I am myself one of
those weak-minded people, and the beguiling
aspect of a conversation, which generally opens
with a deceptive air of sprightliness, has lured
me many times beyond my mental depths.
Nor have I ever been able to understand why
DIALOGUES. 215
Mr. Buskin's publishers should have entreated
him, after the appearance of " Ethics of the
Dust," to " write no more in dialogues." To
my mind, that charming book owes its quality
of readableness to the form in which it is
cast, to the breathing-spells afforded by the
innocent questions and comments of the chil-
dren.
Mr. W. W. Story deals more gently with us
than any other imaginary conversationalist.
From the moment that " He and She " meet
unexpectedly on the first page of " A Poet's
Portfolio," until they say good-night upon the
last, they talk comprehensively and agreeably
upon topics in which it is easy to feel a healthy
human interest. They drop into poetry and
climb back into prose with a good deal of
facility and grace. They gossip about dogs
and spoiled children ; they say clever and
true things about modern criticism ; they con-
verse seriously, but not solemnly, about life
and love and literature. They do not reso-
lutely discuss a given subject, as do the
Squire and Foster in Sir Edward Strachey's
" Talk at a Country House ; " but sway from
text to text after the frivolous fashion of flesh
216 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
and blood ; a fashion with which Mr. Story
has made us all familiar in his earlier volumes
of conversations. He is a veteran master of
his field ; yet, nevertheless, the Squire and
Foster are pleasant companions for a winter
night. I like to feel how thoroughly I dis-
agree with both, and how I long to make a
discordant element in their friendly talk ; and
this is precisely the charm of dialogues as a
medium for opinions and ideas. Whether
the same form can be successfully applied to
fiction is at least a matter of doubt. Laurence
Alma Tadema has essayed to use it in " An
Undivined Tragedy," and the resuit is hardly
encouraging. The mother tells the tale in a
simple and touching manner ; and the daugh-
ter's ejaculations and comments are of no use
save to disturb the narrative. It is hard
enough to put a story into letters where the re-
lator suffers no ill-timed interruptions ; but to
embody it in a dialogue — which is at the same
time no play — is to provide a needless ele-
ment of confusion, and to derange the bound-
ary line which separates fiction fronn the
drama.
A CURIOUS CONTENTION.
What an inexhaustible fund of quarrel-
someness lies at the bottom of the human
heart ! Since the beginning of the world,
men have fought and wrangled with one an-
other; and now women seem to find their
keenest pleasure and exhilaration in fighting
and wrangling with men. In literature, in
journalism, in lectures, in discussions of every
kind, they are lifting up their voices with an
angry cry which sounds a little like Madame
de Sevign^'s " respectful protestation against
Providence." They are tired, apparently, of
being women, and are disposed to lay all the
blame of their limitations upon men.
There is nothing very healthful in such an
attitude, nothing dignified, nothing morally
sustaining. Life is not easy to understand,
but it seems tolerably clear that two sexes
were put upon the world to exist harmoni-
ously together, and to do, each of them, a
share of the world's work. Their relation to
218 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
one another has been a matter of vital interest
from the beginning, and no new light has
dawned suddenly upon this century or this
people. The shrill contempt heaped by a few
vehement women upon men, the bitter invec-
tives, the wholesale denunciations are as value-
less and as much to be regretted as the old
familiar Billingsgate which once expressed
what Mr. Arnold termed " the current com-
pliments " of theology. It is not convincing to
hear that " man has shrunk to his real pro-
portions in our estimation," because we are
still in the dark as to what these proportions
are. It is doubtless true that he is " imper-
fect from the woman's point of view," and
imperfect, let us conclude, from his own ; but
whether we have attained that sure superiority
which will enable us to work out his salvation
is at least a matter for dispute. There is an
ancient and unpopular virtue called humility
which might be safely recommended to a
woman capable of writing such a passage as
this, which is taken from an article published
recently in the "North American Review."
" We know the weakness of man, and will be
patient with him, and help him with his lesson.
A CURIOUS CONTENTION, 219
It is the woman's place and pride and pleasure
to teach the child, and man morally is in his
infancy. Woman holds out a strong hand to
the child-man, and insists, but with infinite
tenderness and pity, upon helping him along."
The fine unconscious humor of this sugges-
tion ought to put everybody in a good temper,
and clear the air with a hearty laugh. But
the desire to lead other people rather than to
control one's self, though not often so naively
stated, is by no means new in the history of
morals. It must have fallen many times under
the observation of Thomas a Kempis before he
wrote this gentle word of reproof. " In judg-
ing others a man usually toileth in vain. For
the most part he is mistaken, and he easily
sinneth. But in judging and scrutinizing him-
self , he always laboreth with profit."
And, indeed, though it be true that in civil-
ized communities a larger proportion of wo-
men than of men live lives of cleanliness and
self-restraint, yet it should be remembered that
the great leaders of spiritual thought, the
great reformers of minds and morals, have in-
variably been men. All that is best in word
and example, all that is upholding, stimulating,
220 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
purifying, and strenuous has been the gift of
these faltering creatures, whom we are now
invited to take in hand, and conduct with
" tenderness and pity " on their paths. It
might also be worth while to remind ourselves
occasionally that although we women may be
destined to do the work of the future, men
have done the work of the past, and have
struggled not altogether in vain, for the phy-
sical and intellectual welfare of the world.
This is a point which is sometimes ignored in
a very masterly manner. Eliza Burt Gamble
who has written a book on " The Evolution of
Woman. An Inquiry into the Dogma of her
Inferiority to Man," is exceedingly severe on
theologians, priests, and missionaries, by whom
she considers our sex has been held in subjec
tion. She lays great stress on certain material
facts, as, for example, the excess of male, births
in times of war, famine, or pestilence ; and the
excess of female births in periods of peace
and plenty, when better nutrition brings about
this higher and happier result. She asserts
that there are more male than female idiots,
and that reversions to a lower type are more
common among men than women. She has a
A CURIOUS CONTENTION. 221
great deal to say about the ancient custom of
wife-capture as a token of female superiority,
and about the supremacy of woman in all
primitive and prehistoric life, a supremacy
founded upon her finer organization, and upon
the altruistic principles which rule her con-
duct. But even in this spirited and elaborate
argument no attempt is made to put side by
side the work of woman and of man ; no com-
parison is offered of their relative contri-
butions to civilization, social progress, art,
science, literature, music, or religion. Yet
these are the tests by which preeminence is
judged, and to ignore them is to confess a
failure. " If you wish me to believe that you
are witty, I must really trouble you to make a
joke." If you are better than the workers of
the world, show me the fruits of your labor.
Against this reasonable demand it is urged
that never in the past, or at least never since
those pleasant primitive days, of which, un-
happily, no distinct record has been preserved,
have women been permitted free scope for
their abilities. They have been kept down
by the tyranny of men, and have afforded
through all the centuries a living proof that
222 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
the strong and good can be ruled by the weak
and bad, physical force alone having given to
man the mastery. It was reserved for our
generation to straighten this tangled web, and
to assign to each sex its proper limits and
qualifications. The greatest change the world
ha* ever seen is taking place to-day.
" However full the air may be of other
sounds," said a recent lecturer on this subject,
"the cry that rises highest and swells the
loudest comes from the throats of women who
in the last years of the nineteenth century of
the Christian era are just beginning to live.
Men cannot appreciate this as we do. From
time out of mind they have used their brains
and their instincts as they chose, and they can-
not understand the ecstacy we feel as we
stretch the limbs which have been cramped so
long. What does it matter if they do not?
One thing is sure. New wine is not put into
old bottles. The village that has become a
city does not return to its villageship. The
man does not put on the child's garments
again. So, whether men hate us or love us,
we have outgrown the cage in which we sang.
The woman of the past is dead."
A CURIOUS CONTENTION. 223
It is not highly probable that universal hate
will ever supplant that older emotion which
must be held responsible for the existence and
the circumstances of human life. But " the
woman of the past " is a broad term, and ad-
mits of a good deal of variety, The chaste
Susanna and Potiphar's wife ; Cornelia and
Messalina; Jeanne d'Arc and Madame de
Pompadour ; Hannah More and Aphra Behn,
these are divergent types, and the singing
bird in her cage does not stand wy distinctly
for any of them. Humanity is a large factor,
and must be taken into serious account before
we assure ourselves too confidently that the
old order is passing away. For good or for
ill, women have lived their lives with some ap-
proach to entirety during the slow progress of
the ages. It can hardly be claimed that either
Cleopatra or St. Theresa was cramped by con-
finement out of her broadest and amplest de-
velopment.
Even if a radical change is imminent, there
is no reason to be so fiercely contentious about
it. Let us remember Dr. Watts, and be paci-
fied. Our little hands were never made to
tear each other's eyes. It is possible surely to
224 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
plead for female suffrage without saying spite-
ful and sarcastic things about men, especially
as it is not their opposition, but the listless
indifference of our own sex, which stands be-
tween the eager advocate and her vote. There
is still less propriety in permitting this angry
sentiment to bias our conceptions of morality,
and we pay but a poor tribute to woman in
assuming that she should be privileged to sin.
The damnation of Faust and the apotheosis of
Margaret make one of the most effective of
stage illusions ; but it is not a safe guide to
practical rectitude, and we might do well to
remember that it is not Goethe's final solution
of the problem. In our vehement reaction
from the stringent rules of the past, we are
now assuming that the seven deadly sins grow
less malignant in woman's hands, and that she
can shift the burden of moral responsibility
to the shoulders of that arch offender, man.
The shameful evidence of the courts is bandied
about in social circles, and made the subject-
matter of denunciatory rhetoric on the part
of those whom self-respect should silence. It
does not strengthen one's confidence in the
future, to see the present lack of moderation
A CURIOUS CONTENTION. 225
and sanity in people who are going to reform
the world. When wives and mothers meet to
denounce with bitter eloquence the immorality
of men, and then ask contributions for a mon-
ument to Mary Wollstonecraft, " who suffered
social martyrdom in England a hundred years
ago, for advocating the rights of woman," one
feels a little puzzled as to the mental attitude
of these impetuous creatures. A sense of hu-
mor would save us from many discouraging
outbreaks, but humor is not a common attri-
bute of reformers. It is the peace-maker of
the world, and this is the day of contentions.
THE PASSING OF THE ESSAY.
It is the curious custom of modern men of
letters to talk to the world a great deal about
their work ; to explain its conditions, to up-
hold its value, to protest against adverse criti-
cism, and to interpret the needs and aspirations
of mankind through the narrow medium of
their own resources. A good many years have
passed since Mr. Arnold noticed the grow-
ing tendency to express the very ordinary de-
sires of very ordinary people by such imposing
phrases as "laws of human progress" and
" edicts of the national mind." To-day, if a new
story or a new play meets with unusual appro-
bation, it is at once attributed to some sudden
mental development of society, to some distinct
change in our methods of regarding existence.
We are assured without hesitation that all
stories and all plays in the near future will be
built up upon these favored models.
To a few of us, perhaps, such prophetic
voices have but a dismal ring. We listen to
THE PASSING OF THE ESSAY. 227
their repeated cry, " The old order passeth
away," and we are sorry in our hearts, having
loved it well for years, and feeling no absolute
confidence in its successor. Then some fine
afternoon we look abroad, and are amazed to
see so much of the old order still remaining,
and apparently disinclined to pass away, even
when it is told plainly to go. How many
times have we been warned that poetry is
shaking off its shackles, and that rhyme and
rhythm have had their little day ? Yet now,
as in the past, poets are dancing cheerfully
in fetters, with a harmonious sound which is
most agreeable to our ears. How many times
have we been told that Sir Walter Scott's
novels are dead, stone dead ; that their grave
has been dug, and their epitaph written?
Yet new and beautiful editions are following
each other so rapidly from the press, that the
most ardent enthusiast wonders wistfully who
are the happy men with money enough to buy
them. How many times have we been assured
that realistic and psychological fiction has sup-
planted its gay brother of romance? Yet
never was there a day when writers of roman-
tic stories sprang so rapidly and so easily into
228 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
fame. Stevenson leads the line, but Conan
Doyle and Stanley Weyman follow close be-
hind; while as for Mr. Rider Haggard, he
is a problem which defies any reasonable
solution. The fabulous prices paid by syndi-
cates for his tales, the thousands of readers
who wait breathlessly from week to week for
the carefully doled-out chapters, the humiliat-
ing fact that " She" is as well known through-
out two continents as " Robert Elsmere," —
these uncontrovertible witnesses of success
would seem to indicate that what people really
hunger for is not realism, nor sober truthful-
ness, but the maddest and wildest impossibili-
ties which the human brain is capable of con-
ceiving.
And so when I am told, among other pro-
phetic items, that the " light essay " is pass-
ing rapidly away, and that, in view of its ap-
proaching death-bed, it cannot be safely recom-
mended as " a good opening for enterprise," I
am fain, before acquiescing gloomily in such
a decree, to take heart of grace, and look a
little around me. It is discouraging, doubt-
less, for the essayist to be suddenly informed
that his work is in articulo mortis. He feels
THE PASSING OF THE ESSAY. 229
as a carpenter might feel were he told that
chairs and doors and tables are going out
of fashion, and that he had better turn his
attention to mining engineering, or a new food
for infants. Perhaps he endeavors to explain
that a great many chairs were sold in the
past week, that they are not without utility,
and that they seem to him as much in favor
as ever. Such feeble arguments meet with
no response. Furniture, he is assured, — on
the authority of the speaker, — is distinctly out
of date. The spirit of the time calls for some-
thing different, and the " best business talent "
— delightful phrase, and equally applicable
to a window-frame or an epic — is moving in
another direction. This is what Mr. Lowell
used to call the conclusive style of judgment,
"which consists simply in belonging to the
other parish ; " but parish boundaries are the
same convincing things now that they were
forty years ago.
Is the essay, then, in such immediate and
distressing danger? Is it unwritten, unpub-
lished, or unread? Just ten years have
passed since a well-printed little book was
offered carelessly to the great English public.
230 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
It was anonymous. It was hampered by a
Latin title which attracted the few and
repelled the many. It contained seven of the
very lightest essays that ever glided into print.
It grappled with no problems, social or spirit-
ual ; it touched but one of the vital issues of
the day. It was not serious, and it was not
written with any very definite view, save to
give entertainment and pleasure to its readers.
By all the laws of modern mentors, it should
have been consigned to speedy and merited
oblivion. Yet what happened ? I chanced to
see that book within a few months of its pub-
lication, and sent at once to London for a
copy, thinking to easily secure a first edition.
I received a fourth, and, with it, the comfort-
ing assurance that the first was already
commanding a heavy premium. In another
week the American reprints of u Obiter Dicta "
lay on all the book counters of our land. The
author's name was given to the world. A
second volume of essays followed the first ; a
third, the second; a fourth, the third. The
last are so exceedingly light as to be little
more than brief notices and reviews. All
have sold well, and Mr. Birrell has established
THE PASSING OF THE ESSAY. 231
— surely with no great effort — his reputation
as a man of letters. Editors of magazines are
glad to print his work ; readers of magazines
are glad to see it; newspapers are delighted
when they have any personal gossip about the
author to tell a curious world. This is what
" the best business talent " must call success,
for these are the tests by which it is accus-
tomed to judge. The light essay has a great
deal of hardihood to flaunt and flourish in
this shameless manner, when it has been
severely warned that it is not in accord with
the spirit of the age, and that its day is on the
wane.
It is curious, too, to see how new and
charming editions of " Virginibus Puerisque "
meet with a ready sale. Mr. Stevenson has
done better work than in this volume of scat-
tered papers, which are more suggestive than
satisfactory ; yet there are always readers
ready to exult over the valorous " Admirals,"
or dream away a glad half -hour to the seduc-
tive music of "Pan's Pipes." Mr. Lang's
"Essays in Little" and "Letters to Dead
Authors " have reached thousands of people
who have never read his admirable translations
232 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
from the Greek. Mr. Pater's essays — which,
however, are not light — are far better known
than his beautiful "Marius the Epicurean."
Lamb's " Elia " is more widely read than are
his letters, though it would seem a heart-break-
ing matter to choose between them. Hazlitt's
essays are still rich mines of pleasure, as well
as fine correctives for much modern nonsense.
The first series of Mr. Arnold's " Essays in
Criticism " remains his most popular book, and
the one which has done more than all the rest
to show the great half -educated public what is
meant by distinction of mind. Indeed, there
never was a day when by-roads to culture were
more diligently sought for than now by people
disinclined for long travel or much toil, and
the essay is the smoothest little path which
runs in that direction. It offers no instruc-
tion, save through the medium of enjoyment,
and one saunters lazily along with a charming
unconsciousness of effort. Great results are
not to be gained in this fashion, but it should
sometimes be play-hour for us all. Moreover,
there are still readers keenly alive to the plea-
sure which literary art can give ; and the essay-
ists, from Addison down to Mr. Arnold and
THE PASSING OF THE ESSAY. 233
Mr. Pater, have recognized the value of form,
the powerful and persuasive eloquence of style.
Consequently, an appreciation of the essay is
the natural result of reading it. Like virtue,
it is its own reward. "Culture," says Mr.
Addington Symonds, "makes a man to be
something. It does not teach him to create
anything." Most of us in this busy world are
far more interested in what we can learn to do
than in what we can hope to become ; but it
may be that those who content themselves
with strengthening their own faculties, and
broadening their own sympathies for all that
is finest and best, are of greater service to
their tired and downcast neighbors than are
the unwearied toilers who urge us so relent-
lessly to the field.
A few critics of an especially judicial turn
are wont to assure us now and then that the
essay ended with Emerson, or with Sainte-
Beuve, or with Addison, or with Montaigne, —
a more remote date than this being inaccessi-
ble, unless, like Eve in the old riddle, it died
before it was born. Montaigne is commonly
selected as the idol of this exclusive worship.
" I don't care for any essayist later than Mon-
i
234 IN THE DOZY HOURS.
taigne." It has a classic sound, and the same
air of intellectual discrimination as another
very popular remark : " I don't read any mod-
ern novelist, except George Meredith." Hear-
ing these verdicts, one is tempted to say, with
Marianne Dashwood, " This is admiration of
a very particular kind." To minds of a more
commonplace order, it would seem that a love
for Montaigne should lead insensibly to an
appreciation of Sainte-Beuve ; that an appre-
ciation of Sainte-Beuve awakens in turn a
sympathy for Mr. Matthew Arnold ; that a
sympathy for Mr. Arnold paves the way to a
keen enjoyment of Mr. Emerson or Mr. Pater.
It is a linked chain, and, though all parts are
not of equal strength and beauty, all are of
service to the whole. " Let neither the pecu-
liar quality of anything nor its value escape
thee," counsels Marcus Aurelius; and if we
seek our profit wherever it may be found, we
insensibly acquire that which is needful for
our growth. Under any circumstances, it is
seldom wise to confuse the preferences or
prejudices of a portion of mankind with the
irresistible progress of the ages. Rhymes
may go, but they are with us still. Romantic
THE PASSING OF THE ESSAY. 235
fiction may be submerged, but at present it is
well above water. The essay may die, but
just now it possesses a lively and encouraging
vitality. Whether we regard it as a means
of culture or as a field for the " best business
talent," we are fain to remark, in the words
of Sancho Panza, "This youth, considering
his weak state, hath left in him an amazing
power of speech."
/